SHOPKEEP Excerpt: On Gen X

Gen X calls bullshit on your narrative. Why is this?

Because we were left alone to figure it out on our own. And have come out all the better for it.

“Generation X, history’s neglected and forgotten cohort, was raised at a time when America’s parents decided, almost en masse, to almost totally abdicate their responsibilities. So, they left the kids at home while they went off to discos and key parties, or abandoned their children altogether while they fucked off to California to ‘reinvent themselves’,” as the author Chris Knowles puts it in his excellent book of cautionary eschatologically-minded essays, The Endless American Midnight. Add in our introduction to world-stage politics through the theatrical plays called Vietnam and Watergate, and you produce a born cynic who scrutinizes and suspects narratives, not falls for them.

Some excoriate the boomers for abandoning their children to pursue the decade of me-ness as the 70s were designated by Tom Wolfe and other media voices. Individualism is all, in many ways, but once you have a kid, a higher ideal should take precedent than personal indulgence. But, hey, I never had any kids, so why should any parent listen to me? Do as thou wilt. I’m sure they’ll come out fine. I’m fortunate the sex, drugs and rock & roll didn’t finish me, but again, my Gen X training would help me in later years to solve the problems arising from so much unsupervised, indulgent behavior of my own.

Meanwhile, we’ve got the millennials growing their beards out to prospector length and day-drinking some of the highest alcohol-content in history. Enough said. I wouldn’t think about them at all, if there weren’t so many of the buggers.

Gen Z? The current kids? They deserve their own book, not a sidebar. Many are wakeful; many see through the scrim of bullshit promulgated by the government and their lackeys in the media (or vice versa, as the case may be). These folks seem like Generation X 2: The New Batch. I love them, love being around them at the shop. They will change history—they won’t sit back on their laurels like the Boomers and Millennials, waiting to be told what to do. Gen Z knows that there are more choices in life than the either-or duality offered by mainstream culture and politics.

My Boomer parents, so young as they were, never had the chance to pursue too much individualism as above described by Mr. Knowles. Not here in rural South Cack. They were busy toiling at their low-level jobs to provide a comfortable home for me, so much so I didn’t even realize we were in the working-class end of the economic spectrum. Growing up, life felt middle-class to me, not poor.

By the time I went to college, they had risen through their ranks to achieve such status. They paid my way through college, when it was still possible for parents to do so. I don’t lambast my folks for not being home in the afternoon to keep an eye on me—while this got me into considerable trouble, being alone so much produced a capable and courageous problem-solver. My parents were—are, in the case of my Pop—decent folks whose youthful indulgences were minor compared to many profligate souls who went hog-wild in the 1970s, abandoning the principles and idealism of the previous generation, but keeping the substance abuse. Way to go, geniuses.

Having said the above about my personal story, to Gen X, Boomers and Millennials seem entranced and easily manipulated. Look at the the older folks—they were herded into being idealistic hippies, then as quickly into the materialistic yuppy stereotype of the 1980s. Millennials, with their cancel-culture wokeness having been socially engineered, are as easily misled.

Not so Gen X. We may be ‘history’s forgotten middle children’ as Chuck Palahniuk called us in Fight Club, but we are also autodidacts, self-starters, lifelong learning individualists who rarely slink away from a problem waiting for someone else to come along to solve it; we are our own Hegelian dialectic, problem-reaction-solution, and so we recognize when this manipulative technique is used to move the minds of millions—see 9/11, see 3/11. We see clearly, where others have but occluded vision. We walk among you, and soon the time may come when YOU will turn to us for wisdom, for help.

Now, since we were left alone to help ourselves during formative times, it remains to be seen how willing many of us may still be to assist those who wrought so much destruction with their narcissistic and indulgent ways. When the time comes we’ll look into things, because it’s what we do around here; we’ll get back to you.