Calling All White People, Part 67
TODAY’S EPISODE: Gen X finally gets noticed—in a very bad way
You know, it wasn’t that long ago that me and my fellow members of Generation X were shaking our heads at how news stories would come out with the opinions or leanings of various generations, and so often Gen X would literally not be listed along with the Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z. Hell, they were more likely to include the Silent Generation than Gen X.
We would grumble about being the invisible “middle child” and then would further grumble when some younger Millennials and most of Gen Z referred to everyone in Gen X as “Boomers.”
It all annoyed me, for sure, but maybe they were being prescient with that “Boomer” shit.
Because, let’s face it: Gen X—my generation—is not nearly as “counterculture” or “free thinking” or any of the cool shit most of us claimed to be over the years. And basically, we are largely responsible for handing the last presidential election to Donald Trump.
I use “we” loosely here. I, being a sane human being with compassion and morals, voted for Kamala Harris to try to prevent Trump from ever seeing the Oval Office again unless through a prison TV while watching The West Wing or something. But, it is my generation and we really showed out for Republicans and thus helping to jettison the Constitution lately in favor of oligarch/autocrat rule. So, as much as I’d like not to, I have to admit that an awful lot of people my age were really awful down deep all along or were just really easy to turn awful because they have no spines.
There are a lot of theories as to why this happened. It’s not that Gen X was an overwhelmingly liberal generation, but they certainly didn’t seem like the generation that would throw LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous people, Black people, migrant workers, women and pretty much everyone else under the bus. But that’s what happened. Maybe it isn’t so shocking considering how many of our protagonists in TV shows and movies were clearly conservatives and/or incels.
Honestly, I am not surprised by the sharp lean to the right and the burst of support for Republicans among my Gen X brethren. It startled me. It hurt. It made me feel dirty just being in that generation even if I wasn’t following that dark path. But it didn’t take me long to reconcile that, while I may get more leftist the older I get (and while the Gen X people I’ve kept in touch with aren’t conservatives) this has happened before.
You may not have lived through the hippie movement and free love movement and all that in the 1960s (at least not with any conscious awareness of it; hell, I was barely a toddler at the tail end of the ‘60s), but you’ve likely heard of it even if you’re a young Millennial or Gen Z human. Those were Baby Boomers.
Yes, it was Boomers who protested against the Vietnam War, who put flowers in their hair and got high on weed and psychedelics and kind of blew off monogamous thinking for a while. Not all of them, of course, but a lot of them. The liberal folks in the 1960s who made such splashes in the news and helped to nudge the needle a little more to the left socially were Boomers.
And what did the Boomers do in the 1980s? They shifted solidly rightward. The anti-establishment hippies were now firmly in the establishment and they were worried about the economy and they fell for Republican lies and Ronald Reagan charisma and set in motion many of the things that made our current slide toward fascism possible. It mostly started in the 1980s with former hippies who renounced progressive stances. And now Gen X has followed in their footsteps.
It’s not surprising that Gen X would worry about the economy and their futures. Stuck between aging parents and sometimes still having actual children to raise (or adult children who struggle) and having little financial security, they fell for the same okie-doke that the Boomers did. They figured that voting in Republicans would help the stock market and lower taxes and then somehow trickle down to them.
Yeah, that won’t happen. Because the even more frustrating thing about this is how stupid every damn Gen X’er is—stupider than the Boomers—who fell for this. The Silent Generation and the Boomers (especially the Baby Boomers) systematically locked those of us in Gen X out of advancement in workspaces and in politics. They controlled everything and then took away, piece by piece, all the things in government and society that helped them get ahead and get financially secure. They experimented on Gen X and then perfected that betrayal of their children and grandchildren until they ensured that no generations younger than them would have much of a chance at any security at all.
Yet despite living that reality, so many Gen X’ers caved in to that trope about “you get conservative as you get older” instead of allying with Millenials and Gen Z liberals (who are too few in number, as Gen Z is already trending heavily rightward, especially the young men) to fight the system.
Sometimes you can’t fight the system. I’ve never really been in a position to fight it directly. But I’m for damn sure not going to give in and join the enemy. I’m not going to sell my soul for some vague “promise” I’ll be rewarded. To be honest, I’d rather die.
If this post seems like a ramble, that’s because it is. I don’t have any suggestions or ideas of how to turn the ship around for Gen X or how to counter the damage so many of them did by following the Trumpy path, especially when so many in Gen Z seem poised to drink up all the GOP and MAGA poison willingly and continue the reversal of all the good that progressive policies over the decades have done.
And while I can’t let Gen X women off the hook—because too many of then shifted right as well and white women in particular often uphold the patriarchy and white supremacy—I wonder how much of this is a failure of men. Have we ever been able to sustain being good guys? No, not really. Ultimately, we men (white men most specifically) continue to occupy a disproportionate number of seats in government and in the board rooms and in the executive offices of businesses. We hold too much of the wealth and we continue to see women as objects to control and we lapse so easily.
And maybe that’s the crux of it. Maybe the only kernel of wisdom I can offer here is to watch yourself. Check yourself. Don’t take the easy path. That’s often what turns us into the Nazis or rapists or racists or bigots of any kind. Because just like Gen X followed in Boomer footsteps, it’s been shown time and again how white people in particular and men on the whole so easily backslide.
Sure, the “nice guys” from high school didn’t openly harass girls when they were young but so many of them turned into incels as adults when their “niceness” wasn’t getting them laid on the daily. White people put up Black Lives Matter signs but stopped supporting Black movements and causes when they lost interest, and some of them just turned against Black people entirely because Black people didn’t kiss their white asses hard enough.
Yeah, it’s easy to slip into whiteness and ignore the rest of humanity. It’s easy to slip into toxic masculinity and forget about seeing women as fully autonomous humans. I can see very clearly how my life would change “for the better” if I just slipped fully into the embrace of white supremacy or male dominance. I’m not saying it would improve my finances or my chances of a future that doesn’t involve eating out of dumpsters but the siren call and warm hugs of whiteness or maleness would make me feel better. Make me feel like I was better and more deserving than everyone else.
It would be a lie, but it would also be a balm.
I’m not that easily seduced by the enemy, and maybe neither are you. But it starts in small ways. We give in here; we give in there. On little things. We move our moral compass a bit. We justify bad actions or poor voting decisions with flimsy excuses.
So, if you believe in progressive ideals. If you really think all people are worthy of being treated as humans. If you really don’t want fascism or oligarchy or authoritarianism as the norm, make sure you don’t budge. But that takes diligence. And chances are you’ve already budged somewhere—perhaps in many places. Gen X in a general sense folded like a deck of cards. We need to not fold, or stop folding, and try to reach those in our generation (and outside of it, too) to make them wake up to the reality that while life wasn’t perfect before, we were moving in many of the right directions.
Mass deportations, revocation of diversity initiatives, rolling back of women’s rights, demonization of transpeople, and so many more reversals of progress…well, those aren’t the right directions. Watch yourself. Mind your choices. Make the right ones and encourage others to do the same. Because while I’m currently rooting for the Millennials, they have plenty of time to turn down a dark path still—just like the Boomers and Gen X’ers before them. We can’t keep making progress only to leap several steps back. That’s not how we build community and keep society going strong. It’s how we destroy the world and kill ourselves.
[To find other installments of “Calling All White People,” click here]
