Gen X, Our Time Is Now

For too long, people have ignored Gen Xers. They love to reference the Baby Boomers, and then skip over to Millennials and Gen Z.

Well, what about us?

The Baby Boomers get a lot of hate these days, deservedly so. But we have to remember that the Boomers fought for everything that they got. They were the hippies of the 60s and 70s practicing free love, making it OK to smoke pot in festivals, and fighting for women to work outside the home and have their own checking accounts if they so chose. The Black Panthers were Boomers. Gloria Steiner is a boomer. So is Angela Davis. Boomers were the ones crawling on the steps of the White House for disability rights. Many of the social gains that we benefited from in the last century came from the grandparents we deride for refusing to let go of control of everything today.

The Riot Grrls and the Second Wave feminism of the 1990s was the last big push that we saw involving Gen Xers at the helm. Occupied Wall Street was too regionally specific to have as much impact as it could have.

Since we grew up in the Seinfeld age, I sometimes feel that we got so used to thinking that being ironic or even sardonic about the ways of the world could change the world. Too many of us have laughed ourselves to keep from crying for so long, that we have forgotten to actually change the world. We also completely ignored all dictionary definitions and believed Bernie Sanders when he said that we were going to have a “revolution” through the electoral process.

Gen X has been asleep at the wheel. We assumed that the previous generations’ work would remain for future generations. That was a terrible assumption! Now we are mired in the unfettered capitalism destroying our relationships, schools, workplaces, our land, our planet. In many cities in the United States, you cannot even drink the tapwater!

Demonstration Against the Vietnam War in 1967.

But it's not entirely our fault. The powers that be in previous generations saw how effective Vietnam War protests, the Civil Rights Movement, LGBTQ+ activism, and overall collective actions were changing things. They saw how Third World solidarity had spread and was a threat to big corporations’ attempts to go into other people's countries, take whatever they wanted, and make themselves even wealthier. They framed it as Communism, even if they were homegrown mixtures of capitalism and communism developed with their own social systems in mind. Rather than allowing countries around the world to control their own oil and rare earth minerals, we violently pushed out elected leaders from Lumumba to Allende to Mossadegh. This way, the oil and rare earth minerals would stay flowing to the Global North. Now Gen Xers from White rural communities, young college students, and BIPOC communities wouldn't get any pesky ideas! Appalachians starting mining co-ops to share profits among the workers themselves? Young people reading books and challenging their conservative parents? Blacks and Latines arming themselves against pre-existing white gangs and police violence?

[Insert eye roll]

What happened? Federal funding was increasingly pulled from colleges and universities, making them wildly more expensive. They built up massive prisons to incarcerate our youth, especially men who “fit the description.” The cost of educating and keeping ourselves out of prison became a heavy burden to bear for average Americans. Three two processes, among many others, hit GenX at the kneecap to prevent us from organizing the same way as the generation before us. Since people always find a way to resist, hip-hop was one of these ways to funnel discontent in Black and Latino communities. But in the 90s and early oughts, as I was becoming an adult, I saw most of hip-hop turn into a “get rich or die trying” endeavor rather than one to “fight the power.” Changing the world needs both culture and collective political work. But for most of my youth, when activism tends to grab people the most, collective politics was at the margins.

We grew up with Reaganomics plaguing our nation to let millionaires become billionaires. They did this, in part, through ending profit-sharing with every day workers. Their yachts, villas in Italy, and private planes were supposed to be our pensions and retirement accounts, inflation-proof salaries, and down payment on homes. Our wages were stolen to fill millionaires and billionaires pockets.

Billionaires Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

I did not grow up with the concept of billionaires. Now we watch them on social media in all their conspicuous consumption glory! They gallivant about the world with the money that came from our labor as we stay at home salivating on Instagram or social media. They tuck their money away in Switzerland and the Caribbean and are angry by the amount of taxes they have to pay the United States government to function. Rather than just coughing up the cash, they convince us and democratically elected leaders that because they spend so much money on taxes, they should have the right to dictate where those tax dollars go. They fund entire political campaigns, whether locally or globally, based on this greed.

“We're smart because we have lots of money! Let me tell you how to spend it, United States government!”

They convince us that they would be great political leaders because they want their taxes to go where they please. Really, they are selfish and do not want to help people with less than them.

Today, we are surprised at how weak our democratic system is. We are surprised by the number of Boomers who are still in Congress. We don't realize that the same Boomers who fought to change society for themselves purposefully kept us out of the democratic system for a long time because of lessons learned from the past.

Of course, many of us have entered and worked in elected positions. Many of us have worked as activists. Nevertheless, we have largely been absent from discussions around changes in leadership that are necessary to keep our democracy strong.

Today, we are much older. Many of us are out of prison. Now we are looking to the youth-- the millennials and the Gen Zers-- to change the world for us. Or we like to compare ourselves to Europeans who fought and died to make capitalism work better for them, while ignoring those struggles. We act as though European nations are somehow inherently better than us when they are not. They have the battle scars and bloodshed to prove it!

In his 1857 speech in New York State, Frederick Douglass said “a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.” It was his famous "if there is no struggle, there is no progress” speech when he says that power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will.

I've grown tired of the satire, thinking that being ironic or even sardonic about the ways of the world would change it. We've laughed to keep from crying for so long, that we have not stood up enough to change the powers that be. Joke’s on us. The days of satirical comedy as the only way to address social issues is over. Laughing and shaking your heads at the dire nature of the world is no longer good enough. It's time for us to pull our fair share to protect our democracy and enable it to thrive. We cannot expect younger generations of Americans to do the things that we refused to do. We have been targeted against organizing for long enough.

It's time for Gen X to refuse to be forgotten and fight for a better country for ourselves and future generations. We have to work with Millennials and Gen Z to improve this country before, not after, Social Security runs out.

Now that we've reached the age where "we don't care,” it's time to stop pretending we are embarrassed would-be millionaires. It's time to play rough and dirty. When they go low, it's time for us to pull them into the sewage. We Gen Xers grew up rough and tough. It's time to put it to good use so that we can rebuild our democracy.