It was the great misfortune of the Thirteenth Generation to get to the party just after the magic bus left and the only people still there were passed out or had died of overdoses.
Jon Gabriel elaborates.
[D]efining an entire generation by their caricatures is always overbroad. Plenty of hippie-era college kids voted for Nixon, just as many Gen Xers didn’t wear three layers of flannel and listen to grunge. (I preferred shoegaze.) The mass culture these groups spawned, however, helps define them in aggregate.
In a way, that has been
one of my messages for the seventeen-plus years I've been writing.
After the Greatest Generation survived the Great Depression and returned from a bloody world war, they sought a quiet sanctuary in suburbia, sparing their kids such pain. The boomers decided such a life was boring and inauthentic, and tried to replace it with a Summer of Love to usher in the Age of Aquarius. It didn’t go so well.
Gen X was sold the boomers’ failed utopia throughout our youth but never bought it. Our childhood was infused with the wreckage wrought by hippies and yuppies. Draft dodgers and dead rock stars were lifted up as idols while our kiddie shows toggled between LSD trips and eco-apocalypse.
I think no-fault divorce and second-wave feminism had
something to do with the neglected upbringing the Thirteeners had. That, and, oh, those were the babies who were a "choice."
We watched the failure of the War on Poverty, Nixon, Ford and Carter – not to mention our broken homes. It didn’t make us cynical as much as skeptical; institutions were expected to fail more than they succeeded, and we acted accordingly.
So, when these millennial and Gen-Z whippersnappers blame everything on the olds, remember that Gen X was there first. You don’t get to right all the wrongs until we’ve had our chance to fix things. Or, more likely, just screw it up in a new way.
Yes, emergence is like that.
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