Reposting this here for my own memory as well. Something I just wrote in response to someone’s comment (on a FB group for Gen X) about the 1961-1964 cohort (the early-wave Xers, not Boomers) and how we should start a club.
I wrote:
We’re Xers, so we should start The Club That Isn’t a Club, Club. 🙂
And, yeah, the 1961-1964 cohort is statistically and experientially some of the hardest hit in terms of youth pathologies* … trailing after the Boomers’ ever-so-excused, 15-ish-years-long, youth-pathology behavior spike.
We 1961-1964 Xers got (and were!) the tail-tail end of that youth-pathology spike, but we didn’t get the childhood world and era Boomer children experienced in which everything was copacetic, and Society built a golden age for its children to inherit.
Not that Boomers wanted the keys to their “square” parents’ kingdom. Nor could they know to appreciate the profoundly stable world of their childhood, particularly vis-a-vis what is relevant to children’s safety and security; whereas, Xers, most particularly the 1961-1964 cohort, got none of the golden-age childhood years though all the ramifications of the scorched-earth destruction young adult Boomers unleashed in their deeply personal and core fury and righteousness against the mechanical, soulless world they perceived their parents to live in.
So, yeah, maybe we should start a club …
***
FWIW, Youth pathologies include behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, driving intoxicated, sexual promiscuity, suicide, violence, dropping out of school, trouble with the judicial system, etc.
