generation x
Saturday, July 31st, 2004And one more thing. "Generation X" is a misnomer. Let's define the term as "anyone who spent their teen years in the 1980s," which seems like a fair definition to me, because a whole hell of a lot changed after 1989 (the end of the Cold War, the weird "Gulf War" armchair view of combat, the introduction of the internet, etc). But when we say "Generation X," we're almost certainly not thinking of people who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, or Spanish-speaking children of migrant workers, or kids who grew up in Compton and became sanitation workers. Those people may have had their teen years in the 80s, but the term doesn't apply to them; it applies to middle class, technologically privileged, mostly white kids growing up primarily in suburbia. These kids had access to cable television (those of us who didn't had almost no exposure to MTV), could afford to purchase music, and watched The Cosby Show and saw parallels (however distant) to their own lives. "Generation X" isn't a generation at all; it's a select group of people who had the privilege to subscribe to a set of cultural ideas.
