Shared Trauma: Explaining Gen X

I recently got into it with a Boomer online who was annoyed with Gen X’ers. To a degree, every generation thinks it’s special—that we have some unique, shared character trait that elevates us in some way. This Boomer didn’t seem to understand the way Gen X refers to its past to explain its present worldview, mistaking our stories as solely braggadocio instead of examples of shared trauma that we’re finally coming to terms with.

So figured I take a stab at explaining it.

Generation Kill¹

Some refer to my grandparents era as The Greatest Generation, who, in the words of Tom Brokaw, “saved democracy” by fighting and winning the Second World War. (Tell that to Poland.) Not sure how that squares with the liberty-smashing FDR administration, but okay, whatever.

Boomers might point to defeating the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War by turning America into an economic superpower. Just don’t mention the Carter years. Fair.

Millennials will mention…something. I’m not sure what but I’m sure there are noteworthy accomplishments. I’m not trying to take shots here, and if you’re a Millennial, let us know what it is in the comments. I’ve still never read Harry Potter.

And I mentioned a few weeks back how impressive Gen Z is turning out to be.

Gen X is a different ball of wax.

On the one hand, we were blessed to grow up in an era of relative peace, with fathers and uncles who’d been to Vietnam and didn’t want to talk about it, with good reason. They let us watch 1980’s action flicks and everyone was happy because America always won. Nobody was drafting our older brothers into foreign wars, and those who went to Grenada or the Persian Gulf did so willingly, sent off with cheers and greeted likewise when they came home a few months later.

On the other hand, Gen X had plenty of other traumas to navigate. It wasn’t physical war that shaped our childhoods—it was something else entirely.

You’re On Your Own, Kid

Perhaps some Gen X’ers had a different run of it (without divorce or two-income parents working all the time) but the following seems to be pretty consistent among the people I’ve known and spoken with over the years:

We learned we had to fend for ourselves—waking up to an often empty house, fixing up a bowl of cereal and pouring in sugar till it crested the heap of Rice Krispies and consuming it in front of MTV.

Then, off we pedaled, or walked, or got bussed to schools where we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, learned fake history, and played games that are now banned from playgrounds. We smashed each other to smithereens while recess monitors looked the other way (if they were even looking at all, makes you wonder). We got tough and learned not to cry about…anything…because adults were rarely around to keep things from escalating and nobody picked you onto a basketball team if you had a reputation as a sissy. Not sure about the girls, but I don’t recall too many of them crying in public, either.

On special days, they rolled TVs into classrooms so we could watch astronauts get disintegrated, roped us into “an assembly” to show us film strips of how erections worked, or had DARE cops instructing us how not to become a coke addict.

After school, the latch key generation let ourselves into the house and spent the afternoon watching cartoons, dabbling in witchcraft, eating Jiff on saltines, or having various types of sex with the other kids whose parents also wouldn’t get home till at least 5:30.

When we weren’t messing around with each other, we watched re-runs of Penny getting abused by her mamma on Good Times, learned about hook-ups and abortion on HBO, got conditioned to hate Russians, or watched those silly Tri Lambda nerds getting their revenge by sexually assaulting sorority girls, among numerous other crimes.

By the time our parents got home, even the kids who weren’t “going out with” boyfriends and girlfriends had been through the emotional wringer. But eventually our parents did get home, and they’d let us toss some Hungry Man dinners into the microwave, pull up a TV tray, and then join them for some family entertainment which was often great…except when it wasn’t:

We saw a kid bruised up by his alcoholic dad on Silver Spoons.

We watched a kid nearly suffocate to death in a refrigerator on Punky Brewster.

We saw Arnold’s buddy Dudley on Different Strokes get groomed by a pedophile, pose for child porn, and nearly get molested in the bathtub.

We saw Mallory get sexually assaulted by her “uncle” on Family Ties, while 17-year-old Alex was statutorily² raped by a woman he delivered groceries to. Alex also got hit by an alcoholic uncle (Tom Hanks, coincidentally), and later traumatized when his best friend was killed in a car accident (superb acting, Michael J. Fox, btw). Alex also did some speed.

The hell, Family Ties?

Elsewhere we watched Boner (yes, his name) and Eddie argue in favor of doing coke on Growing Pains, the girls trying out bulimia on the Facts of Life, and Monroe confess getting raped by two obese women on Too Close For Comfort.

And let’s not forget Jackie getting beat up on Rosanne, followed by us whooping it up for the writers implying Dan was gonna kick the dude’s a** during the closing credits.

Don’t even get me started on Afterschool Specials.

Indoctrination 101

If all of this resonates with you, it’s probably because you’re a Gen X’er and vividly remember most of that—the personal experiences and the TV drama we consumed. I guarantee you have friends for whom every one of those things apply; the steady drip of messaging The-World-Is-A-Scary-Place was the hallmark of Gen X’s childhood, and likely by design.

But it wasn’t merely that; it was that we were constantly told about the reality of the fallen world and then given full access to it. Our parents were perfectly fine with us going Lord knows where doing whatever with whomever so long as we got home before the street lights turned on. Today’s children also have even more access to it, but the difference is that Gen X parents know how to control that access. Many Boomers didn’t seem to care.

Again, I’m not trying to crap on our parents. Some of them did the best they could given their circumstances but others just didn’t. If you’re reading this, Mom or Dad, I love you. No shame. But we don’t heal by ignoring the past, and owning it is on all of us.

Far from being insulated from the dangers lurking in society, Gen X kids swam in it. Some of us were consumed by it. Others managed to escape those years without a police record (whew) and minus STDs, but the trauma was imprinted and many deal with it still.

Is is any wonder that so many Gen X women attest to being sexually assaulted to one degree or another in their formative years? Or that so many Gen X men have a hard time reconciling their upbringing with Biblical standards of manhood?

We are perhaps a little hardier, and little more disillusioned, and little tougher to fool than other generations because we learned too young that we need to be fierce or die. We were indoctrinated and responded accordingly. On 9/11, all those years of training told us what we needed to do: Trust the TV and get ready to kick some a**.

The De-Programming of Gen X

The other day I was driving to a church study group with my daughter. We were listening to a country station on Spotify when the Toby Keith song “Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue” came on.

It was the first time I’d heard that song post-Plandemic and I became frustrated with having loved it back in the day.

Oh, and justice will be served and the battle will rage
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with
The U.S. of A.
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your a**
It’s the American way

On 9/11, this was the response of GenX in a nutshell.

We did what we had trained for on the playground when we imagined Russians parachuting from the sky—not pause to think, or pray, or ask for discernment from a transcendent authority or outside sources—we responded with a swift boot up their a**.

The world was a dangerous place, remember? The TV said so. So we went to war, sang the songs, swallowed the party line and mocked the angry libs for being unAmerican.

But by the time 2020 rolled around, many Gen X’ers had learned better. By then, our generation had been to war, raised our kids through it, and we’d learned through hard experience to see the circus for what it was.

After twenty years of lies, fake news, medical malpractice, and cover-ups, many of us immediately recognized the actual threat to liberty and fought it, with a few brave Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z patriots by our side.

Gen X began to learn that it’s not the world that’s scary—the world is full of wonderful, beautiful people, even in places our TV told us to hate—but that it’s the people who run the world that we need to worry about.

And they still control the messaging, though the delivery method has transitioned from the TV we grew up glued to, to the Facebook and YouTube feeds habitually in our hands.

Generations Lost In Space

And here we are. While the Greatest Generation exits stage left, the rest of us are trying to come to terms with what to do with the world we’ve inherited.

Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again ³

Since we’re all in this together, perhaps we need to stop comparing ourselves in antagonistic ways. Boomers had their share of trauma and feral living too, and Millennials have had to survive an over-medicated culture that tossed community gatherings out the window. I don’t know know how to explain their psychology. Perhaps a Boomer or Millennial will write a similar article. I can really only explain how my people got this way.

My favorite phrase for explaining Gen X: We were 30 when we were 10, and we’re still 30 now that we’re 50.

And if you grew up in an age with no internet, landline phones, and in a culture where your parents would hand you five bucks in the morning then tell you to go do stuff just so long as you’re back by dinner, then you know what I mean.

If you cracked your head on a rock falling off your bike, either your buddies walked you home or you stumbled back alone; nobody was calling 911 to help you and we were okay with that. We walked it off and usually made fun of each other afterward.

We had to, because that’s what it took to cope in our world’s nightly entertainment. I’ll see your Mary Tyler Moore wrestling with abortion and raise you Wheezie on The Jeffersons getting stalked by a deranged killer in a bunny suit smoking a cigar.

And that’s just one of many Gen X images we may need a lot of Jesus and a little therapy to get out of our heads.

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If you enjoyed this article, you may like these as well:

1. Generation Kill is a 2004 book and 2008 documentary following Marines in Iraq. The term “kill” is a multi-use term used by US Marines to convey (among other uses) agreement in place of “affirmative”, “yes,” “hell yeah”, etc...

2. The Age of Consent varies from state to state, year to year, and if Family Ties was set in Ohio, then Alex might have legally consented to sex at age 16 in 1982. This, of course, would not have been the case with much of Family Ties’ audience.

3. Lyrics from American Pie by Don McLean