Kids in America: Gen X essays
If Gen X were a chip on America’s shoulder, we’d be Gen XL.
It’s my birthday week, and I’m a proud member of Generation X, so I spent part of this week with Liz Prato’s new memoir-in-essays, “Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning” (SFWP).
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The year before I entered high school, my mother asked if I wanted to go to prep school. I was stunned. It seemed completely out of character for her to send me away. And how were we going to pay for prep school on my father’s salary? It turned out she wasn’t thinking of Choate or Miss Porter’s, but had somehow learned about a private high school a few miles from our house. It was quite small and quite unknown, but it did have the word “prep” in its name. I scoffed and told her that I would much rather attend our local public high school, a very good public high school, like all the kids I knew. She seemed relieved and didn’t bring up the subject again. But her offer stuck in my mind because it was such a departure for my usually pragmatic mother. The only explanation I could come up with was that it was the Eighties, the Age of the Preppies, and she didn’t want me to be left out.
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Liz Prato was a preppy, a student at what is now Kent Denver School in Colorado, but being part of that privileged class didn’t protect her or her schoolmates from the vicissitudes of life. In fact, preppydom’s influence on the generation born between 1965 and 1980 had its insidious side, in which people who weren’t already part of the dominant class came to believe that gaining the trappings of preppydom would also gain them entry, and in pursuing these trappings severed themselves either intentionally or unwittingly from the supposedly inferior lives they were born into. That, of course, is a story as old as humanity, but somehow it seemed crasser, more calculated and callous, in the Eighties.
Prato graduated from high school in 1985, which gives her impeccable bona fides as a Gen Xer. Her notes on Generation X’s peculiar historical niche couldn’t ring truer:
We are the first generation in modern history to make less money than our parents.
We are the last generation to live without fear of being gunned down in school. We are the last generation raised without awareness of neurocognitive disorders and mental illness in kids. We are not the last generation to look the other way — or be oblivious — when those among us sexually assault those among us at parties, but we suspect — we hope — we are the last generation that figured it seemed okay for male teachers to have sex with the girls. We are the first generation to lose our virginity when sex was linked to a deadly disease — one that our president long refused to name, much less give a shit about.
“Kids in America” reflects on race, economic inequality, mental health challenges, rape culture and more in an era when such subjects were rarely acknowledged, let alone discussed, through essays framed by Prato’s high school classmates, family members and friends. Prato also trains her lens on Eighties pop culture and the messages it disseminated, particularly the behemoth known as “Beverly Hills, 90210,” of which she writes, “It was a show about Gen X kids, written by late Baby Boomers, and produced by The Greatest Generation.” Guess who came out the winner there. Hint: It wasn’t Gen X.
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If Gen X were a clothing size, we’d be Gen XS. In the United States, there are 65 million of us, compared to 71.5 million Baby Boomers, 72 million Millennials and 68 million Gen Zers. The difference doesn’t seem that significant, numerically speaking (when I looked up those numbers, I was surprised that the gap between Xers and Boomers wasn’t bigger). But the impact can be considerable, culturally speaking. Take the infamous — among Gen Xers, anyway — CBS TV graphic that neatly erased us:
When this screenshot hit Twitter, Gen Xers reacted with predictable snideness. One sample response:
Gen X was apparently out of the building during roll call, probably too busy taking care of an elderly parent while sending an Uber to an unemployed millennial child and arguing with a post-millenial about why the WiFi is so slow.
If Gen X were a chip on America’s shoulder, we’d be Gen XL.
But during our coming-of-age, we applied our snideness mostly from the sidelines or to things that really didn’t matter. In “Kids in America,” Prato calls out that reluctance to face head-on the issues of the day. Take police brutality, which Gen X was well aware of long before the protests of 2020:
After Rodney King’s beating aired on nighttime news, Gen X didn’t take to the streets with signs and bullhorns. Okay, neither did the Boomers, but they’d already paid their dues, and it was up to the next generation to pick up where they left off.
Except we didn’t. We watched from our TV screens — something we’d been trained to do since early childhood.
A Gen X reckoning, indeed.