Gen X Prep
An excerpt of "Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning," an essay collection by Liz Prato. Plus, an event...
We were privileged. We were mostly white, although a few of us were Black or Hispanic or Asian or Native American. We were old money and new money and not a lot of money, but the majority of us were upper-middle class. In movies and TV shows that depicted schools like ours, the kids drove BMWs and Mercedes and Porsches and Corvettes. We didn't drive BMW's and Mercedes and Porsches and Corvettes. We drove brand new Jeeps and Jettas, used VW rabbits and hand-me-down the station wagons. Some of us didn't have cars, so we bummed rides from the ones who did, or from our parents.
Our school had once been two: the Kent School for Girls, and Denver Country Day for boys. In 1974, they went from two schools to one, becoming Kent Denver Country Day. The school’s website now says that is when our school became Kent Denver, when “Country Day” was dropped, but we know differently. KDCD was on our sweatshirts and notebooks and report cards and diplomas in the 80s. We were Kent Denver Country Day—aristocratic, plutocratic, elite—for longer than the school admits.
We bounced around in the backs of station wagons without seatbelts and rode bikes without helmets. We had telephones before answering machines, and TVs before VCRs, and Dewey Decimal before Wikipedia.
We didn't have cheerleaders or prom queens or homecoming kings, and we didn't take shop or auto mechanics or typing or home-ec. We took classes that would prepare us for the SATs, that would prepare us for college, that would prepare us for a career in the professions—Shakespeare and French and European history and biology and Yale and Tulane and Brandeis and Duke. We were expected to be lawyers and doctors and architects and bankers and other people who did things with money. We would own and we would sell: land, oil, stocks, coaxial cable, uranium.
Only a few of us didn't go to college or finish college because we had to work, because we needed money and were needed by family. Those of us who did make it through college graduated into a recession, and boomeranged back to our parents’ houses and took jobs in coffee shops and clothing stores and gourmet markets and pubs. We tried this career, then that, and then still changed to another. We became employed and unemployed more times than we could count. We are still counting.
We were born while young men dying in faraway jungles and young people dying in nearby demonstrations and our president betraying democracy were shown on nightly TV. We were born into the hope of the moon landing and into the despair of the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy. We bounced around in the backs of station wagons without seatbelts and rode bikes without helmets. We had telephones before answering machines, and TVs before VCRs, and Dewey Decimal before Wikipedia. We watched a lot of TV. We heard new music from the radio and our older siblings and record stores where we flipped through bins and held vinyl in our hands. We watched Prince and George Michael and Michael Jackson and Joe Strummer the first time their videos were shown on MTV.
We stood in line to watch Star Wars, and then the Empire Strikes Back, and then stood in line to watch them again. We spent 444 days praying that fifty-two American hostages would be safely released from captivity in Iran.
We celebrated the patriotism of America's bicentennial and the pride of Colorado’s centennial, and we watch Kunta Kinte kidnapped and beaten and maimed by Ben Cartwright and Lou Grant and Mr. Brady. We stood in line to watch Star Wars, and then the Empire Strikes Back, and then stood in line to watch them again. We spent 444 days praying that fifty-two American hostages would be safely released from captivity in Iran. We watched the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II and the successful assassination of John Lennon. We cheered the U.S. men's Olympic hockey team to win the Miracle on Ice against the USSR, underscoring that the Cold War was very much alive.
We played the earliest wave of video games: Pong and Space Invaders, Asteroids and Galaxian. We lived seventy miles from the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the Cheyenne Mountain Missile Defense Center, with a bunker built to deflect a thirty-megaton nuclear explosion, and we were thirty miles from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. We watched our world turn to nuclear winter on The Day After in 1983.
We were called latchkey cynical lazy sarcastic flighty disaffected alienated easily-distracted late-blooming self-involved aimless apathetic skeptical pessimistic self-medicating impatient angry uncommitted won't-grow-up purposeless unreliable slackers.
We are the first generation in modern history to make less money than our parents.
We were called latchkey cynical lazy sarcastic flighty disaffected alienated easily-distracted late-blooming self-involved aimless apathetic skeptical pessimistic self-medicating impatient angry uncommitted won't-grow-up purposeless unreliable slackers.
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.
We build new companies and nonprofits in technology. We write books and write code, and are doctors and teachers and lawyers. We direct plays and make music and TV. We manage restaurants and raise families and dance powwow and serve in the Navy. It’s said we're the last generation raised without the threat of terrorism, but we lost people we loved to terrorism before 9/11, before Oklahoma City. We lost ourselves to freak accidents and addiction and mental illness and suicide and rare cancers and white supremacy. We ended up in rehab and cults and homeless shelters and bankruptcy and morgues.
We are Gen X Prep.
Mark your calendars for August 18th at 7pm EDT for a virtual conversation between Liz Prato, author of Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning, and Sari Botton, author of And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen X Weirdo. They’ll discuss their books and their generation. Free, over Zoom. Only 100 spots. Sign up!
 | A guest post by
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This is brief excerpt from a book called Kids in AMERICA: a Gen X Reckoning. In a 1000-word introduction, which this is, she is not going to cover everything that happened to our generation, in every corner of the globe! Nor does she in her book. But she covers a lot of common American Gen X experiences in the book, and I highly recommend it.
I say yes to all this but remember the gen x kids in Ireland and the terrorism they lived with. I hope we’re the last to think all the generations only exist in our own little North American part of the world.