When we speak of the wholesale societal neglect GenX children experienced, it’s important to understand it was … well, wholesale … full, complete, society-wide and institutional.
From a WaPo article about children now riding to school in “bike buses” (somewhat organized groups that ride en masse along a specific route), I found this statement so telling:
“If you grew up in the 1960s, walking or biking was the most common way to get to school. Among children from kindergarten through eighth grade living within a mile of school, nearly 90 percent walked or biked there. That began to change in the 1970s.
School districts, rather than renovate urban buildings or build close to students, relocated their schools to cheap land on the edges of communities, while cutting back on bus service.”
While GenXers are born starting in 1961, they started being the elementary-school-aged kids in the ’70s.
Society/communities/the mid-life adults in power, CHOSE not to support children’s safety, but rather their pocketbooks instead, and they CHOSE both to make schools farther away and services to get to school less available.
Did Xers survive? Of course. (That’s what we/they do; they are the ultimate survivalist generation.) But you can see even in this one little statement in this one little article hints of the cultural sentiment around protecting children (or not), which is always a key factor in generational formation.
Photo from the WaPo.
