The Nashville Feed

One can’t be truly disconnected anymore unless you really try. I haven’t posted the last few Sundays because I was at the beach then recovering from the beach. I don’t think I’m going to post something every Sunday from now on, I rather post when inspiration hits.

The time off got me thinking does Generation X vacation different from others? Sixteen of us spent 5 days in a rented house two blocks off the beach in Destin. When Generation Xers go on vacation we don’t leave work, technology and the net behind. In that house we had at least 7 laptops and leached off the neighbors’ wireless connection. For what reason were all these’s computers needed? Me personally it was for writing and hopefully checking email for others it was the same but mainly checking information online and email. Technology has shrunk down to the point that carrying it out and about is fairly simple.

I think technology is now a part of our life that being disconnected is a thought path not taken. Now with the mobile net and especially the always connected iPhone (we live blogged the launch) we don’t have to be. I text messaged, watched a movie and surfed the internet all the way to Florida on my phone. The next generation is even more connected that we are.

I think that the technology helped isolate us on vacation as much it helps people connect in general society. What do you think? Have you gone on vacation and left your gadgets behind? Do you think as technology becomes more a daily part of our society that vacation will be no different from any other time except we’re not at home?

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In casual conversation a week or so ago I had talked about the Gen-X Perspectives post where I stated that I had “despised” the Baby Boomers. This was off the cuff remark that caught the ear of an actual Baby Boomer that was sitting on the coffee shop patio. He stopped me and we talked for a few minutes where we agreed on quite a few things; more than I had thought we would. The conversation moved from economics to politics and finished on personal experiences from our generations perspective. I enjoyed that kind of conversation because at the end I hope that I we both came away with something.

Re-reading the article I actually said “I feel like the Baby Booms have left us a mess of a world to clean up and they’re selfish bastards for it.” I don’t take that back and won’t. When their generation is retired and in need of healthcare and social security my generation is going to have to make the difficult decisions they didn’t. It’s not going to be pretty either.

Defining Apathy

What is apathy or apathetic? Let’s get it defined as by Dictionary.com:

ap•a•thet•ic

–adjective

1. having or showing little or no emotion: apathetic behavior.
2. not interested or concerned; indifferent or unresponsive: an apathetic audience.

ap•a•thy

–noun

1. Lack of interest or concern, especially regarding matters of general importance or appeal; indifference.
2. Lack of emotion or feeling; impassiveness.

Benn’s last post in this series continued with the theme of Gen-X “apathy” and laid out examples from the 80s and 90s. The comments dug into it further but I think there’s much more behind this than just events that framed the generation as apathetic. The economic factors lent a big hand in the overall outcome.

Exploring the Economics of Apathy

It first began with the economic assault on the middle class by the conservatives with Regan taking national office in 81. In order to understand this we need to go back where the idea began, in the late 60s. You had the population uprising about civil and continuing woman’s rights along an unjust war started with lies. (Last one sound familiar?) You had the conservatives in fear and thinking the world was going to hell, their world view that is. Women in the workplace and black people with the same rights what is happening to my “Leave It to Beaver” world! So then you could make a living off one job where it paid for the house, car and still had money left for savings. People had the time for family and to be involved with these causes. You had the freedom if you quite your job it was fairly easy to get another one or if you were sick the public hospitals were there. If the basics were secure you could expand beyond.

If people were insecure with the basics then they wouldn’t have time for politics or civil rights or much else. Today three jobs is uniquely American. My basic expenses for rent, vehicle and food are over two thirds of my total income. Doesn’t leave much for entertainment or savings does it. I don’t have a tuition loan like most of my friends which is about the price of another auto payment a month. You can thank Regan for ending free college for residents in California.

What Does This All Mean?

It comes down to keep the masses worrying about sustaining the basics of survival and the ones in power can do what they want. Control the news media to blunt the message and the largest protests in the history of the world won’t stop war or the people who profit from it. Give people games and they will be content. Like the games in Rome “Caesar will give them blood and they will love him for it…” In our time the games are brought to us via television.

So is apathy our fault? We have been assaulted economically and socially since birth, we are the beaten puppy that people are afraid will bite when grown. We are grown up and want to bite.

The decisions of the Baby Boomers over the last 30 years are creating a perfect storm for the United States that we won’t be able to pass off decisions to the next generation. The bills are coming due and like every budget you need to make some hard painful decisions. Baby Boomers be ready cause you’re the ones are forcing this.

With that I’m going to throw on some Mathew Sweet and be apathetic about the world for today. Actually since I wrote this I’m sort of doing something.

Further Online Reading:

• The American Prison in the Culture Wars (Sections 5,6 & 7)

Suggested Books:

• Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration
• Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It

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One of the most prominent characteristics attributed to Generation X is that we are apathetic. If this description is accurate, there may be circumstances to explain it.

Generation X has spent our entire lives in the long and heavy shadow of 75 million baby boomers. Those damn boomers have, and continue to, color our lives in the most obscene ways.

On the other side of the sandwich we have all of their fucking (to be taken literally) offspring: Generation Y. Yes, despite the pill and legalized abortion, the bastards bred.

We must admit that the boomers did leave a few things that us Xers have enjoyed. In addition to the aforementioned birth control, we like rock ‘n’ roll (not necessarily boomer rock ‘n’ roll, though), the sexual revolution worked in our favor, and the drugs are nice.

But we’ve often felt that the boomers patted themselves on the back much too hard.
Boomers didn’t end the Vietnam War. They may have played a small part, but the country has never sustained a war of that length. For Christ sake, look at the Iraq thing. We’re less than five years into it and people are already tired of it. No massive protests required. The first Americans arrived in Vietnam in 1954 and the last left in 1973. After almost 20 years of expense, death, and drafts, the boomers claimed credit for ending it all.

Umm, bullshit.

If the boomers had really wanted us to like them, they could have at least legalized marijuana. That seemed pretty important to their generation 30 years ago. They definitely dropped the ball on that one.
Now that the boomers are in power, they have done very little for us (thank you, Clinton) or just totally fuck things up (thank you, W).

Generation X may not have been witness to the drama of the civil rights movement and the cold war, but we have witnessed a changing world all the same.

One of my earliest memories was watching Reagan get shot. There was no real point to it. Kennedy, Kennedy, and King all had some reasoning (and ongoing conspiracy theories) behind their violent ends. The guy that shot Reagan was just batshit crazy. There was nothing more to it.

Welcome to the 1980s. What a wonderful time to grow up.

Fast forward to 1989, when a wall in Berlin collapsed. The cold war ends. It was a spectacular moment, but it offered much more closure to the boomers and their parents than it did to Generation X.

That same year, we watched Tiananmen Square roar with hope, then burn under the crush of the government.
At this time many of us we were preparing to leave high school and considering our own places in this crazy changing world. Those two contradicting events in 1989 set us on our path. The message from the scene in Berlin was that positive change can happen, but Tiananmen Square told us that if it happens 40 years premature it will be burned alive.

Generation X can’t muster that kind of patience.

But Guns ‘n’ Roses, then Nirvana and Pearl Jam, urged us to identify with our angst. So we did, but without a real direction to channel it.

Some pussies at the time were also listening to Richard Marx, Boyz II Men, and shit like that. They most likely remain emotionally confused today, lying on a therapist’s couch, popping Lexapro.

Finally, in 1999, those of us in the Northwest were offered an opportunity to express our disgust. The World Trade Organization came to Seattle, and we were ready. Traffic stopped, shit got broken, confusion ensued. By the time I arrived on the scene the air was thick with tear gas. Generation Xers were beaten, cuffed, and jailed; regardless of whether or not they had stopped traffic, broken shit, or ensued confusion.
After waiting almost a full decade in apathy, we had grasped an opportunity to express ourselves within a democratic society, and we were stomped on for it. Worse yet, no one listened to the message that we were trying to express.

Perhaps apathy is a better policy. Those damn baby boomers seemed to do a lot better once they stopped caring.

So we tried another route, one less anarchistic. We voted. But we voted for Al Gore. And we were told that, even though he got more votes, he didn’t win.

Democracy has not served us well.

A few years later 9/11 hit. Many Generation Xers, those not already wearing a uniform and a beret, signed up for the military. Their age may have been less than ideal, but they now had a cause with government support. They went after the assholes in Afghanistan. Finally, something made sense.
But then the Generation Xers, and everyone else in desert camouflage, were pulled away to fight in a country that had nothing remotely to do with 9/11. It didn’t make sense anymore.

In 2004, the largest protest in United States history hit Washington, D.C. (I was at that one, too).

And no one seemed to care. It was a story that was gone by the next day.

We have had a long career of screaming when no one listens.

All of these are great excuses for apathy. None of these are good reasons for apathy.

Generation Xers will not be heard until we are in power. We will not be in power until we put ourselves in power. But we still will not be heard if we forget our history when we are in power.

Get off your ass and do something to make the world a better place, Generation X.

And baby boomers, you’re not off the hook. You are in a great position to improve the world.

Generation Y, you’re next. Start improving your world now. You can’t blame us tomorrow for everything that you didn’t do today.

Maybe I’m just pessimistic. In the first post of Gen-X Perspectives I wrote about when are we and is it more than just marketing. Through conversations since then my conclusion is its just marketing and we don’t really know when one generation begins or another ends. I heard answers such as Baby Boomers came after World War 2 ended and that Generation X was slackers in 90s and what the hell is Generation Y.

A conversation with a friend she didn’t release she was born smack dab in the middle of what is considered Generation X, 1961 – 1981 if you didn’t read the last article. She said she didn’t feel a part of the X group but I wondered what made one feel a part of it. Is it clothing, culture or your experiences, maybe little be of all. As I was sitting there in baggy jeans, an oversized Beastie Boys black t-shirt and Airwalks circa 1996. The funny thing is I hadn’t worn something like that in years but that day I did.

I do feel very much a part of Gen-X; at 32 years old and still trying to define myself and impact on the world around me. I struggle with relationships and making ends meet. I feel like the Baby Booms have left us a mess of a world to clean up and they’re selfish bastards for it. Corporate power, government power and greed has become overwhelming possible unstoppable. But we still try to stop them. I don’t think it to far-fetched that one day the United States will collapse under the weight of its shortsightedness. I hope I am wrong. It seems from everything I read about Gen-X that pessimism is an underlying theme.

From Wikipedia:

The perception of Generation X during the early 1990s was summarized in a featured article in Time Magazine:

. . .They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix . . .This is the twentysomething generation, those 48 million young Americans ages 18 through 29 who fall between the famous baby boomers and the boomlet of children the baby boomers are producing. Since today's young adults were born during a period when the U.S. birthrate decreased to half the level of its postwar peak, in the wake of the great baby boom, they are sometimes called the baby busters. By whatever name, so far they are an unsung generation, hardly recognized as a social force or even noticed much at all...By and large, the 18-to-29 group scornfully rejects the habits and values of the baby boomers, viewing that group as self-centered, fickle and impractical.While the baby boomers had a placid childhood in the 1950s, which helped inspire them to start their revolution, today's twentysomething generation grew up in a time of drugs, divorce and economic strain. . .They feel paralyzed by the social problems they see as their inheritance: racial strife, homelessness, AIDS, fractured families and federal deficits.[1]

A fairly good description but is the consent bombardment that we’re the pessimistic generation make us that way or are they just reporting what they see. Kind of like the saying does TV reflect life or does life reflect TV?

• Baby Boomers 1949-1960(64ish)
• Generation X 1961(64ish)- 1980(81ish)
• Generation Y 1981 – 1999+
• Millennial Generation 2001+ (Could be considered part of Y)

These dates are debated with-in a few years so take it with a grain of salt just like anything online. Now knowing when the generations are does it change your perception of yourself? Did you know what generation you are grouped in? Are you curious of what is the name of the generation before Baby Boomers? Do a search and explore.

Next Gen-X Perspectives: We’re Not as Pessimistic as We Think

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Weekend posts I tend to be all over the map, culture, rants or whatever; I like to leave the music business writings for the weekdays where I feel they will have more impact. I’ve been thinking about focusing the Sunday post as the view from the 30s or Generation X perspectives. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while and now I have an outlet with an audience (I hope). I think it would be a great experience overall and we might learn something new. I want this to be something where not only do I write about my perspective, ideas and experiences but something that I hope my readers (meaning you) would contribute to the discussion with their view point and experiences regardless of what ever generation you're a part of.

So with that we begin with the first topic: define what is “Generation X”. Yes, this is a very big topic. Yes, its been analyzed to death. Not in a marketing sense but more self exploration. Let's begin with the actual year range as described in my favorite online encyclopedia, Wikipedia:

Typically, people born between 1965 and 1978 are generally considered "Generation X," while others use the term to describe anyone who was in their 20s some time during the 1990s. [1] According to Neil Howe and William Strauss, Generation X includes anyone born from 1961 to 1981 in the United States. The term is used in demography, the social sciences, and marketing, though it is most often used in popular culture.

I would be considered right smack in the middle with that description at my age of 32. Before I read anything about actual range I always thought it was 1960 through 1975ish which wasn't so far off. I never really cared to learn when the previous or next generations began or ended. Do normal people really care or is it just a marketing thing? The non-business world doesn't have to slice and dice people or societies in order continue from day to day. Do they?

Before reading this article or the Wikipedia entry what is the age range that you defined guessed as “Generation X” and what is your reasoning behind it? Is there is an experience that shaped that viewpoint? How about the Baby Boomers or Generation Y?

Email me via the contact form or leave a comment. Then next week hopefully I’ll have something from you to contribute to the next post.

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