GenX is a lost generation. They have had a very rough go of it. Boomers delayed retirement during the great recession blocking X and X got hammered at the same time in their prime earning years. Now comes this covid mess and they will be hammered again and early “retired” like so many Boomers were. X is small and will be passed over. I saw it before I left the corpocracy, millennials were being groomed to move up and X were sort of stuck. Not many of them were hired either in the oil business so there were just not so many of them.
The new sheriff in town is a millennial. They were pegged in the Fouth Turning to be the “Hero” generation. Hero for what and that they are is yet to be seen. So far I am not seeing much at all but button pushers. My son is at the leading edge of the millennials, he pretty much profanes all that is social media and popular though he is as savvy at it all as he wants to be but only when it serves him. His peer group is chronically unemployed though most are graduates with good degrees. So far he remains in high demand, he works and is good at what he does. He turns the lights on in the morning and off in the evening at work.
I am wondering if this covid thing is the crisis of this Secula talked about in the Fourth Turning. It looks like it is far from over and real or contrived it is a mess. An even bigger mess will be if biden is elected and I’m concerned about the real possibility of that. Allegedly smart people don’t “like” Trump’s manner enough to go ahead and vote for biden just out of spite. I’ve broken it off with one long time acquaintance because of that. Just foolish and ignorant of the facts.
By the way, it was not the Boomers that got us in the mess we are in. Blame the Greatest Generation. It was them who ushered in Civil Rights, and I am not saying changes were not needed, but they began all the real give aways and social programs that will drive us into the dust. LBJ said upon sighing the civil rights bill, “ This will have them niggers voting Democrat for the next hunnerd years.” and by god he was right.
Millennials are in an interesting position. We’re the last generation that remembers what the world was like before all of this started: the Internet, social media, the moral disintegration of society. Like it or not, we’re the torch bearers of the old world if there are to be any.
Keep in mind that some of us got off to a very rocky start. I, for instance, graduated at the precise stroke of the Great Recession, and it wasn’t until years later that I was able to really get a career going. I have friends from back in the day who haven’t been so lucky.
But because of what we’ve been entrusted with, I’m confident that there will still be some of us - like me and your son, I hope - who will remember the faith, hope, and simple blessings in life that got us through previous crises.