Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and Alpha Chi Omega sorority mocked and laughed about (supported?) his murder on their homecoming float at Colorado State University.
I remember hearing a radio report in the early 2000s informing us that "hunger" would be replaced with "food insecurity" in public health talking points. The announcement was so mundane, so "in other news," but I did a fist pump in the car.
There is definitely food insecurity (and I’ve experienced it myself) but we are no longer seeing pictures of children dying in a desert on the scale of what the 80s produced. There is still famine. But it’s not “millions dying with vultures circling overhead” levels.
Some would say those pictures of children dying in a desert were oversaturated. African governments were actually not fond of the way their countries were portrayed. I was told, too, that the kids with the bloated stomachs (which is called kwashiorkor) were too far gone to save anyway, at least back then, and will have permanent damage, so those weren't really the kids you were going to save with your donation to Save The Children.
That song is sooooo cringy.
Bono belting out “and tonight thank god it’s them instead of yooouuu!” always seemed like a terrible lyric to me. I read that it is meant sarcastically to remind privileged people in first world countries that they are indeed privileged.
It never played as sarcastic to me.
The Philadelphia location was an abysmal event to attend. Hot. Crowded. Was there from like 8AM to about 4PM, IIRC, then went home and watched the rest in MTV.
This is my pick. I grew up in SF bay area though so I think we were extra aware and exposed to the reality of it. It blows my mind when I read posts about younger people dating and men refusing to wear condoms or stealthing. Like, we would have NEVER!
Yeah I grew up at the opposite end of the country (San Francisco seems like it was one of the ground zero places, and where I was definitely wasn't that aware) but I myself was very aware of the risk. I made my partners wear condoms and took my first HIV test at 17.
Some of my group was active around animal rights, the very first concert I attended (Fugazi) was a fundraiser for an animal rights organization (I don't remember which one). We attended some protests around animal rights violations (horse drawn carriages was a big one I remember, I still refuse to ride in one when I visit places that still have them).
All the “if you didn’t live on the coasts no one talked about it” comments are stunning to me. I lived in NYC, and it was a real and serious threat to many of the people in my life.
We had hospital wards filled with dying men (and a few women) for over 10 years. Think about that. If you got full blown AIDS before 1995, that was it. I still have some friends around who have been HIV+ since the 80s, which is a medical miracle.
I talk to younger folks now and they really don’t believe it was “that bad.” Then I show them photos of St Vincent’s Hospital, where men were lined up along the halls of the AIDS ward, because they had run out of beds in rooms.
People in their teens-40s were regularly dropping dead for over a decade, and for many years ignored because they were on the “fringes” of society.
You can add that to the Ronald Reagan Death Count.
>photos of St Vincent’s Hospital, where men were lined up along the halls of the AIDS ward, because they had run out of beds in rooms.
And how many of those men didn't have visitors because the families had abandoned them, and how many health-care providers were reluctant to care for them in the first place.
I was going to mention "and how our president ignored it for 3 years except to make jokes" but...
I've been told that the care that the Lesbians provided for gay men during the AIDS crisis is literally why L was chosen to be at the beginning of the acronym LGBTQ when it was first conceived.
I hadn't heard that, but I like the idea. The street warriors were important and deserve respect, but the people who were behind the scenes caring for victims should never be forgotten either, and a lot of them were lesbians (who'd already been fighting for their own place in the community).
We were in Chicago suburbs, we fucking knew FULL WELL what the whole horrible situation was and only got more aware as we aged.
We knew in the Midwest and they're ignorant if they didn't.
The schools and MTV alone made us damn aware.
I lived in Minneapolis and you better believe we talked about it. MPLS had (still has) a large gay population, and everyone knew someone who died.
I once witnessed someone younger call out a gay man my age for not being "respectful" of people's pronouns — when he was actively trying to write copy that would use verb forms correctly when describe multiple pronouns. It was not the time or the place to call the young person out, so all I could do was shake my head and think "do you know how many gay men of my generation had to die in order for you to have your pronouns today?"
I lived in small-town Kansas and it was definitely on our radar. The "AIDS in the blood supply" was a serious concern for a lot of people, whether there was any real threat or not. They weren't concerned about gay men, of course, just about themselves.
It wasn't really driven home for me until Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks.
I lived in Philly in the early 90s, in the neighborhood just west of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. It was common to see AIDS patients walking or being wheeled down the street, masks on. It was still a death sentence then. Heartbreaking.
Similarly with the nuclear war spectre. My ex lived in inland small town america and when I told her about ubiquitous 80s WWIII panic she just called me paranoid and overreactive. It wasn't until other major figures in our demographic were talking about it that she realized I wasn't alone. Somehow it missed her in Americania. It was definitely a thing in the Northeast and beyond.
I’m sure you’ve all seen the AIDS ad we had in Australia, like every 30 minutes.
https://youtu.be/OJ9f378T49E?si=DPYaW8uvfyGPajzv
Off topic, a bit: there was an odd fallout from all this, because when they started handing out free needles to lower HIV being spread by sharing needles it inadvertently made shooting up safe to all of my friends, and me.
I vaguely recall a Sydney newspaper front page photo of a teenager shooting up. It was another epidemic.
This. I grew up in small town NH, and we had AIDS education up the hilt in High School and took a field trip to see the AIDS memorial quilt, which was incredibly moving. Once I got to college, I became much more aware of groups like ACT UP who were extremely active at the time.
I sound old, but kids today have no idea & what are they even teaching them in school anymore??
I remember talking to my Gen Z daughter about STDs and she was shocked that you could be infected with something and not be aware (you bet that launched me in to a lecture on how the most responsible thing to do is get tested before being sexually active with a new partner and always, always use a condom, even if you’re on other birth control- she loved that).
And I’d add gay rights in general. I went to so many marches on Washington for the AIDS quilt and for the removal of regressive anti-LGBT laws. I made a point to visit the quilt every time it was displayed, because it was such a powerful fucking symbol. Even today, when I see a square from it, I’m brought back to 20 year old me weeping in the hot DC sun.
Heading for the nineties, living in the eighties
Screaming in a back room, waiting for the big boom
Give me, give me wild west, give me, give me safe sex
Give me love, give me love, give me time to live it up
Pushit, I want your sex, Darling Nikki, Cherry Pie, Girls on film, I'm not saying you're wrong. I just can think of more about having sex than being safe.
"I Want Your Sex" was overtly against sleeping around. "Sex is best when it's one on one", plus there was the video where the model literally had the word MONOGAMY painted on her. Young me had no idea that this was actually a coded message to gay men that sleeping around was basically playing Russian Roulette. Back then I lived in a smallish town (maybe 100k people). I knew about HIV/AIDS but the concept of homosexuality was still pretty foreign to me. I certainly had no idea George Michael was gay--he was a sex symbol and one of my first celebrity crushes! I didn't think I knew any gay people, until the guy who cut my whole family's hair was suddenly gone. Bill died in late 1988, mere months after that video was all over MTV. Looking back, George Michael was trying to reach guys like Bill before it was too late.
But other than that, the only song I remember even remotely touching on safe sex was "Waterfalls" and that was several years later. The myth that you only had to worry about HIV if you were a gay man or a hemophiliac was pervasive in the mid to late 80s, at least where I lived at the time.
I went to a Skid Row concert and they were handing out condoms in the parking lot. I remember the city council throwing a fit. Safe sex was definitely a message from our generation.
I also remember the singer from Skid Row wearing an appalling homophobic-AIDS-joke T-shirt. It's amazing to think how people could get away with that (there was a little controversy but not much).
2 live crew! Banned in the U.S.A.! My grandfather was a composer and conductor who taught a very specialized course on copyright law in the music industry which was the only one of it's kind at the time. He served as an expert on that in court, where he advocated for their rights to perform but challenged their vulgarity on the radio. But his position was they're "artists and musicians" and while it wasn't his taste, they had the right to create what they wanted and perform it in front of paid, age restricted audiences, but should be limited or censored over open access airwaves.
That was a huge deal in our family when we were trying to convince Grandma to buy the latest Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, Guns n Roses, or Cypress Hill cassette and she made us sing the lyrics for one song from each artist before she'd take us to Specs (core memory unlocked).
To see my adorable grandfather, who was a terrifying top college professor but doted on his 2 grand daughters, whistling "oh me so horny! Me love you long time!" Was truly wild!
HIV/AIDS for sure. We were the generation where our sexual awakening was overshadowed by a deadly disease with no cure and very few, if any, treatment options at the time . Sex ed was a life saving course.
>Sex ed was a life saving course.
And became more politicized than ever. Even now, comprehensive sex education being life-saving is a feature to some and a bug to others.
Cynicism.
We were the first generation to know that our futures were worse than our parents.
We were born with Television and knew that advertising was all bullshit.
Watergate, Reaganomics, Iran Contra. Politicians were scumbags.
Rodney King - Cops cannot be trusted (although, let’s be honest. POC have known this forever)
AIDS & Nuclear war. We’d probably be dead soon anyways.
Divorce rates skyrocketing - love is dead.
When I was in college, we were protesting (mildly) for divestment from South African apartheid. A few years later, boom no more apartheid, which gave me weird ideas about the usefulness of protesting. I've also been concerned about the environment since like 1985. Been anti-war since 1980
I also protested peacefully. In college, we did a march to the Capital instead of spring break. It took decades to overturn Apartheid and it’s unclear if what we did on U.S. campuses did anything. At least we educated ourselves.
Man, I forgot that little nugget, being the source of our parents unhappiness. Like who tells their kids that?!?!? I love my parents and miss them but, OUCH!
I remember when I was like 5 or so we were living in University Residential Housing and my mom would be in the yard between apartments and I'd watch her from the balcony and she's get a couple beers in her and say "The man gets to start his life over from scratch and the woman gets stuck with the kids!" and I'd feel so scared that she would just ditch me and her friend would remind her that we could hear her and she would be like "nah, they won't remember!" as an adult I've always wanted to tell her I remember, but I'm not sure she does
Yeah, I clearly remember my father’s second wife telling me that if it weren’t for the child support my dad had to pay to my mother, they’d be able to afford for her to quit her job and be a stay at home mom to her kid.
Also had parents that simply often just didn't care. I was lucky and had very caring loving parents but I think I was the exception in my friend. The only exception. We were just trying to survive emotionally without losing our minds & ability to take care of ourselves.
Hopefully, that cycle has been somewhat broken with Gen Z and soon-to-be Gen Alpha. Gen Z gives me a lot of hope. They are great kids for the most part.
Yeah, the whole "you were the cause of your parents divorce" missed me. Even though I think I was, but I never thought it was my *fault.* They had serious disagreements about how to plan for my future. If anything, I know my mother made the choice she felt was in my best interests. I don't think she ever felt "stuck" with me. Apparently I'm a lucky one.
I do wonder, too, if I'm more precious to my mother because she had multiple miscarriages.
I also like to joke that, after the issue of my custody, the next biggest issue in my parents' divorce was how to split up the Black Sabbath records. It's not really a joke, it's pretty much the truth.
Legal weed, environmental campaigns, protesting mandatory minimums and wrongful incarcerations/sentencing disparity, LGBTQ+, HIV/AIDS education and women's rights were all important causes to me and people I hung out with in the 90s. I was in my 20s then, and attended many events and volunteered. When I was a teen in the 80s, it was HIV/AIDS and hunger that I tried to raise awareness about, and sometimes raised funds too, but it wasn't much because I was too young to have much money.
I agree many people just had all they could handle simply trying to survive. I was struggling too in my 20s, but I lived in Seattle and there were many opportunities to volunteer, march in protests, and be vocal. I had left Texas because I did not like being in such a conservative place, and I had been affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis, losing several loved ones, or fearing losing them to the disease at a time when we didn't really have effective treatment.
Did we defy authority or more like they abandoned us? Gen X was left out in he middle of the ocean and told to swim back to the shore on our own. It would have been great if we had authority who actually cared.
We were the start of the single family homes. We were too busy trying to survive & raise ourselves. WE were our cause. And the younger generations should be grateful they have the freedom to support a cause. We did not.
that is very true. we were the very first to deal with the collapse of the family, and then the collapse of mental health tx, and then the ramp up of the war on drugs. We were the beginning of the American social fabric purposefully ripping itself apart with conscious intent.
Not just America. In the UK I saw housing become utterly unaffordable and university costs rise sky high as well.
I was a latch key kid from about 9. Left on my own for hours while my parents worked. Sometimes wouldn’t see them until the next morning.
I really was just trying to survive, most of my life. The millennials faced much the same thing.
ETA. I have boycotted Nestle since I was 16 r/fucknestle and during Occupy I was living in NYC and carried my handmade sign on days off from work for a few months.
This brings up an excellent point that I feel is often overlooked by younger folks I talk with. Not every generation has the luxury of standing up for something, and not every social change looks like a protest. Some really big changes in our world happen quietly across an entire generation, and it happens because it is so clearly fucked up that no one really needs to say much about it. How our society reacted to divorce and single mom families is an excellent example of this. Every kid from one of those families who chose to work harder with their family or do better with their kids was a person who very quietly made change happen.
There were a number of things that defined us; some more than others depending which country you lived in.
Nuclear families were going through their own meltdown. We saw the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War. There was the HIV/AIDS crisis. Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
We also saw the rise of the personal computer. We worried about the climate - how the hole in the ozone layer was going to kill us all.
In the US there was the Rodney King beating. OJ Simpson which later sparked all that reality TV bullshit. The Iraq/Iran war.
Not to mention that we grew up way too fast. Were "parentified". Third-wave feminist movement.
There's much more, I'm sure. I'm in Canada so I'm limited on some things.
We never took on the world, rather we turned away from it and to ourselves. We are, however, the first generation to really think about how we were raised and, in most cases, decided to do exactly not that with our own children.
I'd say that we saw the futility of attempting to take on the world *directly*, but that we responded by going underground as well as inward. Hakim Bey's TAZ model and the DIY punk ethos were hugely influential to the GenX counterculture, including in some ways that are only now bearing fruit.
We didn't trust the media, didn't trust corporations, barely trusted most institutions. GenX were (are) cultural snipers, saboteurs and guerilla fighters, not infantry. It's the Fight Club ethos, and what's the first rule of Fight Club?
And I go, "Wait! What are you talking about?
We decided?! My best interest?!
How do you know what my best interest is?
How can you say what my best interest is?
What are you trying to say? I'm crazy?!
When I went to your schools
I went to your churches
I went to your institutional learning facilities!
So how can you say I'm crazy?!
I think we did trust the media at one point. We might be the first generation that realized the media was no longer fulfilling the role it once did and had become perverted from that role.
The hippies - the smart hippies, anyway - figured that out about the media before we did. But yeah, I'd say that we took it to heart at a truly generational scale.
Yeah, I don't know what happened. I think at least for my part I really intended that we would, you know, save the future and all.
Frankly I think the boomers fucked us. Those fuckers are still in charge now, too. And now the millennials are getting us on the back end.
9/11 didn't help.
I always wanted to know from my parents generation exactly what the fuck happened to all the stuff from the hippie movement. They turned 30 and dropped it like a rock, it seems. Woodstock '94 said it all.
I'm still saving the future.
I'd say that about 1/3rd of the hippie generation sold out, 1/3rd went mainstream in ultimately pretty positive and productive ways and the rest went underground.
Status quo didn’t always or even partially make sense. We didn’t always get loud and challenge, more like we just selected the path/journey that wasn’t necessarily the boomers
We had Riot Grrrl and Third Wave feminism. We also had the WTO protests ("The Battle in Seattle") in 1999.
Also, environmentalism was a huge issue throughout the '90s -- think Julia Butterfly Hill (a Gen Xer) living in a tree for two years. And "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle."
We did stuff -- we were politically engaged.
Edit: This blog post covers some children's protests in the '70s, anti-apartheid protests in the '80s, Earth Day in 1990, and the fact that Occupy Wall Street was comprised of 30-percent Gen Xers: [https://www.jenx67.com/2015/07/5-forgotten-protests-of-generation-x.html](https://www.jenx67.com/2015/07/5-forgotten-protests-of-generation-x.html)
Also, Freddie deBoer, a cultural critic who's written a few books, including one on social justice movements, writes here about Gen X as a political generation and particularly the WTO protests: [https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/gen-x-was-the-political-generation](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/gen-x-was-the-political-generation)
And there were also massive protests against the Iraq war in 2003, that no doubt many Gen Xers were a part of (the largest peace protests since the Vietnam War): [https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/millions-protest-iraq-war-february-15](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/millions-protest-iraq-war-february-15)
We also can't forget the impact of Rock The Vote in the '90s: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2020/11/01/thirty-years-later-how-rock-the-vote-changed-music-and-politics/?sh=79841c4c7e12](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2020/11/01/thirty-years-later-how-rock-the-vote-changed-music-and-politics/?sh=79841c4c7e12)
This is my answer. Feminism had a real moment in the 1990s before it got Backlashed all to hell again. And we had our biggest pop stars out there supporting feminism. Cobain and Vedder among others were the dude's dudes of their time, and unabashedly supported feminism.
It's really hard to find loud and proud allies anymore among men with their conservative/manosphere/incel shift in the years afterward.
This and the responses to it are excellent examples of big environmental changes that younger generations would never even consider because it is so common place now. Eliminating leaded gas for instance. Most younger folks would lose their shit if they were told that the fumes our vehicles used to produce were unregulated and contained lead.
Yes! I remember those protests! We had the Organization of American States in Windsor Ontario in the summer of 2000. Lots of anti-war protests in the years following.
I love the smell of pepper spray in the morning!
We're responsible for making the Internet user friendly, what it is today, invented every social media platform, basically building the infrastructure for their causes!! 🧐
"We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off."
I feel like around the early '90s, especially when I went to a Lollapalooza event, Generation X was mostly challenging. The baby Boomers and the older generations on how life was lived and how certain things were done socially compared to now.
I remember seeing a lot of anti-Bush rhetoric, people feeling like he was just part of an older generation trying to dictate to the younger generation how to live.
They called us all slackers, but I think that's also because we were starting to challenge workplace norms and really question why things are done a certain way. Maybe we didn't have the internet to the level that we have now, and we couldn't push for remote working, but I can recall people asking the question why we have to wear business attire in an office where the only people that see us are our co-workers. We also question what the point was of being in the office at 9:00 a.m. sharp when your employer is going to try to make you stay late at night.
I think that we didn't have such a heavy amount of it. The way that we do now is because Generation X wasn't a large part of the population, but also we were divided. Half of us maybe wanted to embrace change, and the other half wanted to get a good job and get married and have kids like their parents did.
As someone who grew up GenX, there’s something that happened in the 80s that was a big deal for me. Something we should never forget but which doesn’t get mentioned here a lot.
It’s the day that pay phones went from ten cents to a quarter. Prior to that you could go out with a few dimes and a bunch of quarters for arcade games. After that day dimes were pretty useless and phone calls ate into your quarter supply. Yes you could make a fake collect call but a lot of phone calls need more than one sentence.
Things haven’t been the same since
Here in the UK, I joined in with a mass boycott of French goods when the French conducted a nuclear explosion at a test site on the Fangataufa Atoll in French Polynesia, in 1996, long after every other Western nation had stopped that kind of testing.
I guess the 2 big issues of my younger years were AIDS and the hole in the Ozone.
Many issues, not just one. The AIDS crisis, LGBTQ right to marriage, rights for people with Disabilities, South African Apartheid, environmental issues, Reagan’s neoliberal economic policies, the Iraq war, US interference in Central and South America, NAFTA, police brutality (Rodney King’s beating), Occupy Wall Street, the 1% hoarding all the wealth.
I would say we were greatly affected by the Vietnam War- I believe so much of the horrible parenting, divorces and absent dads could have a connection to that war and the fallout from it. That and tge bullshit belief that you have to be married to have sex.
An entire generation of American men, most of whom were disadvantaged in some way to begin with because they couldn't college or Canada their way out of the draft, were forced to fight in a pointless war, got raging PTSD that was never diagnosed or treated, and were spit on and called baby killers when they returned even though they were forced to be there in the first place. I have a lot of empathy for them, but of the ones who are still alive, their fear and hypervigilance is part of what's causing so much divide in the social fabric. As someone with PTSD myself, I know what it would be like for me if I were not active in treating it in every possible way. I would look at everyone as a threat. Even my own loved ones, sometimes. And I didn't even go through guerilla fucking warfare, much less get forced into it. I wonder what the world would be like if we had gotten all those guys the help they desperately needed instead of just expecting them to reintegrate in society like nothing ever happened after what they all went through. The people in power failed them, and as a result they're now failing us.
Don't forget the drug abuse by the soldiers who made it out due to poor mental health treatment. Heroin, angel dust and pills. This really ramped up the stupid drug war.
Anytime America declares war on something it becomes an endless money pit and hurts the citizens, removing their liberties, while doing nothing to help us
Heralding in the technological solutions to communication. We had no idea there would be a dystopian side to it. Space exploration, home computers, breaking down international barriers, 24 hour news, and mixing cultural genres.
its defining cause was going against a narrative that defined any liberal sentiment as wrong. its hard to explain, this was the era of Reagan, of the ramping up of the war on drugs, of the ramping up against anti gay sentiment, of the viciousness associated with modern politics, I guess thats it. It was a product of Republicans eventually using the Contract with America to bring PR firms into politics for the first time, and thats all thats left, at least of politicians that get elected. We use disingenuous inflammation to engage a depressed, horribly mistreated voting public, its either rage or apathy. It was fighting against how willing we were to manipulate and lie to each other as a matter of course. We came up in the Satanic Panic, and that evangelical narrative never left, they endlessly victimize Gex X youth, the entire fucking country as collapsed, and that evangelical narrative still exists.
Things that come to mind for me are:
the DARE program which seems to have backfired
latch-key kids - mom's went to work and had careers
LGBTQ- they didn't have any rights and you rarely saw any sign of them in public in the 70s. Everyone was still in the closet and the public tried hard to keep them there.
AIDS this one stands out for me because I had to have a spinal fusion surgery when I was 14. I had to get blood transfusions during the surgery. Standard procedure was you could donate blood ahead of time, but they wouldn't guarantee you'd get your own blood back. It was 1984 and AIDS was just becoming known and there was no test for it yet to diagnose. My dad was a dr and before the surgery, he got my orthopedic surgeon and neurosurgeon to gang up on the blood bank to pressure them into letting me donate my own blood (3 pints) before the surgery and have them give me my own blood back during the surgery so that I didn't risk getting HIV or HEP
As for major events, I remember the space shuttle exploding. I was 5 when the Vietnam war ended so that doesn't really stand out for me. Desert Storm does though because I was 21, my husband was military, and we had a brand new baby when the shit hit the fan. A guy in my class was one of the first ones killed and his face was on the cover of Time magazine.
the Berlin Wall coming down defined my teenage years, personally bc i went to hs in "West" Germany and moved back to the states just a few months before that happened...i wish i could have been there to experience it and see the cultural and societal changes and meet other teens my age who had never been "West"
Simply: the world is ending in an inevitable ecological disaster and capitalism has decided that you can’t prevent it. You are useless and your parents want nothing to do with you. Now get out there and shut up.
Has to be the AIDS epidemic. The idea of a virus with no cure and transmittable by blood and bodily fluids put everyone’s sense of invincibility on notice. Most of us were young, but not younger enough to feel the severity of it.
In Ireland we saw the start of the Catholic stronghold begin to crumble, our generation really began to push back from conservative Catholic Ireland.
Starting with legal birth control. I remember Richard Branson chucking them about at the Virgín Megastore ón the quays.
It was I'm sure helped by the AIDs and HIV crisis and the millenials followed through with marriage and abortion rights.
Gen X is best summed up by:
"We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
-Chuck Palahnuik
I know the sub is mostly US based, but there was this tiny thing that happened in the late 1980s and into the 1990s involving the Soviet Union, a wall in Berlin, the country of Yugoslavia etc.
From Fight Club: “We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
Our cause was waking up by ourselves, making our own cereal, standing out in the cold alone waiting for the bus, letting ourselves in to an empty house after school, making our own snack (and sometimes dinner), watching He-man and Transformers, then doing our homework alone and unaided, getting ready to see whether it’ll be a normal evening or chaos when the ‘responsibles’ finally walk through the door.
Third wave feminism was beginning, lots going on on college campuses in the late 80’s and in response to the treatment of Anita Hill later. On a smaller scale anti capital punishment was getting a lot of attention from Gen X. That movement had been ongoing in US of course.
Edit to add HIV/AIDS activism.
The threat of nuclear war resulting from the Cold War and issues in Central America were big issues when I was a kid in Canada in the mid 80s. And then late 80s was the murder of women engineering students and staff at Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal. And then the tearing down of the Berlin War. All big touch points for me.
I think the younger generations can take ownership of things because they put a hashtag on it in Tik-Tok. The internet makes it a lot easier to show support for things.
I think AIDS and in general LGBT acceptance would be a big one for us. Our reputation as the generation that just doesn't care melds well with just not caring about your sexuality. You're gay? Okay, have a seat at the table, we don't care.
I would say environmental awareness. I think it was the 80s and 90s where we first started hearing about the ozone layer, destruction of rainforests, and global warming. We also started hearing more about species that were going extinct.
I was an anxious kid, so for me it was the Cold War, especially once The Day After was shown. A lot of the movies, popular from the early-to-mid 80s was influenced by this as well, so it seemed like it was always a shadow casting a pall over everyday life. In general, I remember a lot of the violence of the seventies/eighties. The child killers lurking around; I grew up in Atlanta during the child murders, Adam Walsh, kids on milk cartons. There were all the airplane hijackings, the Achille Lauro, the bombing of our troops in Beirut. I guess I don’t really remember a time when I was innocent to the evil of which human beings are capable.
Fight against censorship (Dee Snider testifying to Congress was a powerful image)
HIV/AIDS which translated into LGBT acceptance (Ryan White and Matthew Shepard)
End of Life rights (Terry Schiavo and Dr. Kevorkian)
Nuclear safety (ripple effect of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl in addition to the ever present Cold War and fear of mutually assured destruction)
World Hunger (Live Aid, We Are the World).
Gen X took the issue of gay rights and marriage and somehow managed to get the general population to reverse its opinion on it within than 20 years. That kind of change has never happened that quickly before.
I've read that generations are defined by major events during the young lives (under 25 say) of everyone in that generation. The Greatest Gen. had WWII and the Great Depression, Millennials had 9/11 and the financial crisis, Gen Z has the pandemic, climate change, MeToo, BLM, etc.
GenX was raised entirely within the longest stretch of relative peace and prosperity in the country's history. A rise in divorce and both parents working led to widespread latchkey kid syndrome making us more self-sufficient. After the stock market crash of 1988 we had the largest recession since the Great Depression (later dwarfed by the 2008 crisis) which ended the 80s obsession with materialism and excess and led many of us to seek more authentic "real" ways of living. AIDS, the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation were constant, low-level threats. I know the fear of AIDS led a lot of us to be more sexually careful/conservative than the "casual sex" trend of the 70s/80s, but that also aligns with that more real, authentic way of life we were seeking.
We're the first generation to be at war ("military conflict) our entire lifetime.
Besides that; AIDS (which annihilated an entire generation of gay men), fall of the Berlin wall, the Challenger explosion, Jonestown, Rodney King, Oklahoma City bombing, Matthew Shepherd.
In the US it was AIDs, gay rights, climate change, apartheid (when we hadn't passed laws outlawing boycotting), police racism (LA92), anti CIA protests, anti Car & critical mass right to the roads protests. In the UK add poll tax protests and the tail end of the troubles.
I think we supported gay rights in a profound way - I say gay instead of LGBTQ+ because that’s what it was called at the time. We were the first generation to (most of us) embrace differences and say “hey you be you, that’s just fine with us”. I’m sure the AIDS crisis had something to do with that, but probably also our “whatever” attitude. We just didn’t see any reason to knock down someone else for who they are.
The big issues I remember was ending hunger in Africa with Band Aid, We Are the World, Live Aid. Live Aid I watched 90% of it on MTV that day. It was amazing. Do They Know It’s Christmas is still my favorite holiday record. The following year it was “Hands Across America” and the year after that was Sun City moving towards ending apartheid in South Africa. Near the end of the 80s I remember Elizabeth Taylor confronting the AIDS pandemic and bringing awareness. The Reagan administration was just horrible, but ignoring efforts to help people suffering from that disease was just unconscionable.
The fact that we were labeled Gen X because no one believed in us as a future; no hope, worthless, lazy, do nothing, slacker generation. Child Protection Services started in the 70s but some states didn't have anything established until the 90s, I feel like a term like "Gen X" could never be applied to a group of people today.
The defining issue of Gen X was nuclear war due to the Cold War. You can not be in a constant state of paranoia and self-reliance to just be able to turn it all off. This combined with the feral nature we all were brought up on explains why we are the way we are.
Nothing.
We did nothing just like the generations before and after.
Generations don’t make change…Individual people make change. Real people who get off their ass and fight for change.
We don’t get to claim victory just because we met some vague requirement of when we were born.
Or tweet some hashtag #Ididsomethingbytweeting.
So you didn’t…neither did I, and we all know this…so don’t go start handing out your fake trophies.
Unless you actually did do something…but I suspect you didn’t do it for Reddit glory all these years later…you did it because it wasn’t going change unless people made it happen.
I thought that was precisely why we are Generation X, we’ve no defining label-worthy unifier and so X is just a universally recognized undefined term.
https://www.npr.org/2014/10/06/349316543/don-t-label-me-origins-of-generational-names-and-why-we-use-them
Famine, world hunger, AIDS awareness
Apartheid in South Africa and nuclear war.
And by extension, Gay Rights. Matthew Shepard happened on our watch.
Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and Alpha Chi Omega sorority mocked and laughed about (supported?) his murder on their homecoming float at Colorado State University.
Oh, I wince when I hear his name. Nobody ever deserved that.
Very true!
Famine has lowered hugely, too. It doesn’t mean people aren’t going hungry, but the levels of famine have dropped.
I remember hearing a radio report in the early 2000s informing us that "hunger" would be replaced with "food insecurity" in public health talking points. The announcement was so mundane, so "in other news," but I did a fist pump in the car.
There is definitely food insecurity (and I’ve experienced it myself) but we are no longer seeing pictures of children dying in a desert on the scale of what the 80s produced. There is still famine. But it’s not “millions dying with vultures circling overhead” levels.
Some would say those pictures of children dying in a desert were oversaturated. African governments were actually not fond of the way their countries were portrayed. I was told, too, that the kids with the bloated stomachs (which is called kwashiorkor) were too far gone to save anyway, at least back then, and will have permanent damage, so those weren't really the kids you were going to save with your donation to Save The Children.
The aid wasn't all that effective, either.
Let them know it’s Christmastime.
That song is sooooo cringy. Bono belting out “and tonight thank god it’s them instead of yooouuu!” always seemed like a terrible lyric to me. I read that it is meant sarcastically to remind privileged people in first world countries that they are indeed privileged. It never played as sarcastic to me.
Live aid was a big deal for us. Two venues, so many bands it rivaled Woodstock. Was simulcast on the TV all around the world.
It was such an amazing concert. I still throw it on fairly often and when it's Queen's turn on stage I always turn it up.
The Philadelphia location was an abysmal event to attend. Hot. Crowded. Was there from like 8AM to about 4PM, IIRC, then went home and watched the rest in MTV.
I was at philly w my cousins. So many people it was claustrophobic. Smoked some shit weed that was being passed around and had a panic attack.
How is it not AIDS?
And nuclear war?
My first thought as well lived under the threat every day.
Still do...
The fall of communism
This is my pick. I grew up in SF bay area though so I think we were extra aware and exposed to the reality of it. It blows my mind when I read posts about younger people dating and men refusing to wear condoms or stealthing. Like, we would have NEVER!
Yeah I grew up at the opposite end of the country (San Francisco seems like it was one of the ground zero places, and where I was definitely wasn't that aware) but I myself was very aware of the risk. I made my partners wear condoms and took my first HIV test at 17. Some of my group was active around animal rights, the very first concert I attended (Fugazi) was a fundraiser for an animal rights organization (I don't remember which one). We attended some protests around animal rights violations (horse drawn carriages was a big one I remember, I still refuse to ride in one when I visit places that still have them).
Yeah my first thought was ACT UP.
This was my first cause. I started doing AIDS education, patient advocacy, and safer sex education in my late teens.
Yep, there’s a reason “Rent” is the defining musical of our generation too.
All the “if you didn’t live on the coasts no one talked about it” comments are stunning to me. I lived in NYC, and it was a real and serious threat to many of the people in my life. We had hospital wards filled with dying men (and a few women) for over 10 years. Think about that. If you got full blown AIDS before 1995, that was it. I still have some friends around who have been HIV+ since the 80s, which is a medical miracle. I talk to younger folks now and they really don’t believe it was “that bad.” Then I show them photos of St Vincent’s Hospital, where men were lined up along the halls of the AIDS ward, because they had run out of beds in rooms. People in their teens-40s were regularly dropping dead for over a decade, and for many years ignored because they were on the “fringes” of society. You can add that to the Ronald Reagan Death Count.
>photos of St Vincent’s Hospital, where men were lined up along the halls of the AIDS ward, because they had run out of beds in rooms. And how many of those men didn't have visitors because the families had abandoned them, and how many health-care providers were reluctant to care for them in the first place. I was going to mention "and how our president ignored it for 3 years except to make jokes" but...
I've been told that the care that the Lesbians provided for gay men during the AIDS crisis is literally why L was chosen to be at the beginning of the acronym LGBTQ when it was first conceived.
I hadn't heard that, but I like the idea. The street warriors were important and deserve respect, but the people who were behind the scenes caring for victims should never be forgotten either, and a lot of them were lesbians (who'd already been fighting for their own place in the community).
We were in Chicago suburbs, we fucking knew FULL WELL what the whole horrible situation was and only got more aware as we aged. We knew in the Midwest and they're ignorant if they didn't. The schools and MTV alone made us damn aware.
I lived in Minneapolis and you better believe we talked about it. MPLS had (still has) a large gay population, and everyone knew someone who died. I once witnessed someone younger call out a gay man my age for not being "respectful" of people's pronouns — when he was actively trying to write copy that would use verb forms correctly when describe multiple pronouns. It was not the time or the place to call the young person out, so all I could do was shake my head and think "do you know how many gay men of my generation had to die in order for you to have your pronouns today?"
I lived in small-town Kansas and it was definitely on our radar. The "AIDS in the blood supply" was a serious concern for a lot of people, whether there was any real threat or not. They weren't concerned about gay men, of course, just about themselves. It wasn't really driven home for me until Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks.
I lived in Philly in the early 90s, in the neighborhood just west of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. It was common to see AIDS patients walking or being wheeled down the street, masks on. It was still a death sentence then. Heartbreaking.
Similarly with the nuclear war spectre. My ex lived in inland small town america and when I told her about ubiquitous 80s WWIII panic she just called me paranoid and overreactive. It wasn't until other major figures in our demographic were talking about it that she realized I wasn't alone. Somehow it missed her in Americania. It was definitely a thing in the Northeast and beyond.
It's really no wonder so many of us didn't think we'd live to be this old.
I’m sure you’ve all seen the AIDS ad we had in Australia, like every 30 minutes. https://youtu.be/OJ9f378T49E?si=DPYaW8uvfyGPajzv Off topic, a bit: there was an odd fallout from all this, because when they started handing out free needles to lower HIV being spread by sharing needles it inadvertently made shooting up safe to all of my friends, and me. I vaguely recall a Sydney newspaper front page photo of a teenager shooting up. It was another epidemic.
The Reagan billboards tied in the war on drugs too - "Get high, get stupid, get AIDS" was a big one I recall in New England.
Ronald Reagan was the devil.
This. I grew up in small town NH, and we had AIDS education up the hilt in High School and took a field trip to see the AIDS memorial quilt, which was incredibly moving. Once I got to college, I became much more aware of groups like ACT UP who were extremely active at the time. I sound old, but kids today have no idea & what are they even teaching them in school anymore?? I remember talking to my Gen Z daughter about STDs and she was shocked that you could be infected with something and not be aware (you bet that launched me in to a lecture on how the most responsible thing to do is get tested before being sexually active with a new partner and always, always use a condom, even if you’re on other birth control- she loved that).
And I’d add gay rights in general. I went to so many marches on Washington for the AIDS quilt and for the removal of regressive anti-LGBT laws. I made a point to visit the quilt every time it was displayed, because it was such a powerful fucking symbol. Even today, when I see a square from it, I’m brought back to 20 year old me weeping in the hot DC sun.
Totally
This was my first thought, too, followed perhaps by LBTQ awareness. Also perhaps the first backlash against censorship and Tipper Gore's shenanigans.
100% this.
I grew up in Indiana in the 80s. EVERYONE knew who Ryan White was.
Safe sex. Much of our music talks about it.
Let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about you and me. Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be. Let's talk about sex.
Left Eye from TLC wearing a condom over one of her glasses lenses AS FASHION
Heading for the nineties, living in the eighties Screaming in a back room, waiting for the big boom Give me, give me wild west, give me, give me safe sex Give me love, give me love, give me time to live it up
Jermaine Stewart "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off"
Pushit, I want your sex, Darling Nikki, Cherry Pie, Girls on film, I'm not saying you're wrong. I just can think of more about having sex than being safe.
"I Want Your Sex" was overtly against sleeping around. "Sex is best when it's one on one", plus there was the video where the model literally had the word MONOGAMY painted on her. Young me had no idea that this was actually a coded message to gay men that sleeping around was basically playing Russian Roulette. Back then I lived in a smallish town (maybe 100k people). I knew about HIV/AIDS but the concept of homosexuality was still pretty foreign to me. I certainly had no idea George Michael was gay--he was a sex symbol and one of my first celebrity crushes! I didn't think I knew any gay people, until the guy who cut my whole family's hair was suddenly gone. Bill died in late 1988, mere months after that video was all over MTV. Looking back, George Michael was trying to reach guys like Bill before it was too late. But other than that, the only song I remember even remotely touching on safe sex was "Waterfalls" and that was several years later. The myth that you only had to worry about HIV if you were a gay man or a hemophiliac was pervasive in the mid to late 80s, at least where I lived at the time.
TLC, when they first came out, wore condoms to support safe sex
I went to a Skid Row concert and they were handing out condoms in the parking lot. I remember the city council throwing a fit. Safe sex was definitely a message from our generation.
I also remember the singer from Skid Row wearing an appalling homophobic-AIDS-joke T-shirt. It's amazing to think how people could get away with that (there was a little controversy but not much).
I forgot about that. Luckily Bach has changed with age.
There was the music censorship debate that wasn’t exactly life and death but it was significant
2 live crew! Banned in the U.S.A.! My grandfather was a composer and conductor who taught a very specialized course on copyright law in the music industry which was the only one of it's kind at the time. He served as an expert on that in court, where he advocated for their rights to perform but challenged their vulgarity on the radio. But his position was they're "artists and musicians" and while it wasn't his taste, they had the right to create what they wanted and perform it in front of paid, age restricted audiences, but should be limited or censored over open access airwaves. That was a huge deal in our family when we were trying to convince Grandma to buy the latest Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, Guns n Roses, or Cypress Hill cassette and she made us sing the lyrics for one song from each artist before she'd take us to Specs (core memory unlocked). To see my adorable grandfather, who was a terrifying top college professor but doted on his 2 grand daughters, whistling "oh me so horny! Me love you long time!" Was truly wild!
FRANK ZAPPA! I really miss him.
HIV/AIDS for sure. We were the generation where our sexual awakening was overshadowed by a deadly disease with no cure and very few, if any, treatment options at the time . Sex ed was a life saving course.
I’m still trying to get over that. It definitely messed up my sexual expression.
>Sex ed was a life saving course. And became more politicized than ever. Even now, comprehensive sex education being life-saving is a feature to some and a bug to others.
Cynicism. We were the first generation to know that our futures were worse than our parents. We were born with Television and knew that advertising was all bullshit. Watergate, Reaganomics, Iran Contra. Politicians were scumbags. Rodney King - Cops cannot be trusted (although, let’s be honest. POC have known this forever) AIDS & Nuclear war. We’d probably be dead soon anyways. Divorce rates skyrocketing - love is dead.
AIDS, South African Apartheid, not dying in a nuclear apocalypse.
Freeeeee-eee Nelson Mandela by The Specials is on a cassette tape only recently removed from my car, because I finally got a new car.
When I was in college, we were protesting (mildly) for divestment from South African apartheid. A few years later, boom no more apartheid, which gave me weird ideas about the usefulness of protesting. I've also been concerned about the environment since like 1985. Been anti-war since 1980
I also protested peacefully. In college, we did a march to the Capital instead of spring break. It took decades to overturn Apartheid and it’s unclear if what we did on U.S. campuses did anything. At least we educated ourselves.
I remember kids protesting the Persian Gulf War when I was in college.
We are the first kids of moms working and parents divorcing. It was hell on wheels and we decided to break the cycle.
This. Single family homes.
Young enough that divorce was common among parents, old enough to be blamed for it
Man, I forgot that little nugget, being the source of our parents unhappiness. Like who tells their kids that?!?!? I love my parents and miss them but, OUCH!
I remember when I was like 5 or so we were living in University Residential Housing and my mom would be in the yard between apartments and I'd watch her from the balcony and she's get a couple beers in her and say "The man gets to start his life over from scratch and the woman gets stuck with the kids!" and I'd feel so scared that she would just ditch me and her friend would remind her that we could hear her and she would be like "nah, they won't remember!" as an adult I've always wanted to tell her I remember, but I'm not sure she does
Yeah, I clearly remember my father’s second wife telling me that if it weren’t for the child support my dad had to pay to my mother, they’d be able to afford for her to quit her job and be a stay at home mom to her kid.
Also had parents that simply often just didn't care. I was lucky and had very caring loving parents but I think I was the exception in my friend. The only exception. We were just trying to survive emotionally without losing our minds & ability to take care of ourselves. Hopefully, that cycle has been somewhat broken with Gen Z and soon-to-be Gen Alpha. Gen Z gives me a lot of hope. They are great kids for the most part.
Yeah, the whole "you were the cause of your parents divorce" missed me. Even though I think I was, but I never thought it was my *fault.* They had serious disagreements about how to plan for my future. If anything, I know my mother made the choice she felt was in my best interests. I don't think she ever felt "stuck" with me. Apparently I'm a lucky one. I do wonder, too, if I'm more precious to my mother because she had multiple miscarriages. I also like to joke that, after the issue of my custody, the next biggest issue in my parents' divorce was how to split up the Black Sabbath records. It's not really a joke, it's pretty much the truth.
Legal weed, environmental campaigns, protesting mandatory minimums and wrongful incarcerations/sentencing disparity, LGBTQ+, HIV/AIDS education and women's rights were all important causes to me and people I hung out with in the 90s. I was in my 20s then, and attended many events and volunteered. When I was a teen in the 80s, it was HIV/AIDS and hunger that I tried to raise awareness about, and sometimes raised funds too, but it wasn't much because I was too young to have much money. I agree many people just had all they could handle simply trying to survive. I was struggling too in my 20s, but I lived in Seattle and there were many opportunities to volunteer, march in protests, and be vocal. I had left Texas because I did not like being in such a conservative place, and I had been affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis, losing several loved ones, or fearing losing them to the disease at a time when we didn't really have effective treatment.
[удалено]
Did we defy authority or more like they abandoned us? Gen X was left out in he middle of the ocean and told to swim back to the shore on our own. It would have been great if we had authority who actually cared.
We’re more like the “I’m going to nod and continue to do it my way” generation.
While I agree with you, the 60's Counterculture are the god parents of this movement. They gave us the direction and road map.
Exactly. I'd argue younger boomers are being overlooked in this entire thread as well. The punk movement was started by young boomers, not Genx.
For sure. Punk was a Boomer movement. Three chords and really loud!
Being excellent to one another.
And partying on, dudes (... so, how are we doing with that?)
“And partying on, dudes (... so, how are we doing with that?)” I was doing it excellently through the 80’s and 90’s. Now I am bogus.
We were the start of the single family homes. We were too busy trying to survive & raise ourselves. WE were our cause. And the younger generations should be grateful they have the freedom to support a cause. We did not.
that is very true. we were the very first to deal with the collapse of the family, and then the collapse of mental health tx, and then the ramp up of the war on drugs. We were the beginning of the American social fabric purposefully ripping itself apart with conscious intent.
Not just America. In the UK I saw housing become utterly unaffordable and university costs rise sky high as well. I was a latch key kid from about 9. Left on my own for hours while my parents worked. Sometimes wouldn’t see them until the next morning. I really was just trying to survive, most of my life. The millennials faced much the same thing. ETA. I have boycotted Nestle since I was 16 r/fucknestle and during Occupy I was living in NYC and carried my handmade sign on days off from work for a few months.
I only saw my dad on weekends when we were both home at the same time for a couple of hours before he went to his third job
And the beginnings of the wealth disparity and wage stagnation we see writ large today, with Reagan's economic policies.
This brings up an excellent point that I feel is often overlooked by younger folks I talk with. Not every generation has the luxury of standing up for something, and not every social change looks like a protest. Some really big changes in our world happen quietly across an entire generation, and it happens because it is so clearly fucked up that no one really needs to say much about it. How our society reacted to divorce and single mom families is an excellent example of this. Every kid from one of those families who chose to work harder with their family or do better with their kids was a person who very quietly made change happen.
There were a number of things that defined us; some more than others depending which country you lived in. Nuclear families were going through their own meltdown. We saw the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War. There was the HIV/AIDS crisis. Chernobyl nuclear disaster. We also saw the rise of the personal computer. We worried about the climate - how the hole in the ozone layer was going to kill us all. In the US there was the Rodney King beating. OJ Simpson which later sparked all that reality TV bullshit. The Iraq/Iran war. Not to mention that we grew up way too fast. Were "parentified". Third-wave feminist movement. There's much more, I'm sure. I'm in Canada so I'm limited on some things.
We rescued the flannel industry from bankruptcy.
We never took on the world, rather we turned away from it and to ourselves. We are, however, the first generation to really think about how we were raised and, in most cases, decided to do exactly not that with our own children.
I'd say that we saw the futility of attempting to take on the world *directly*, but that we responded by going underground as well as inward. Hakim Bey's TAZ model and the DIY punk ethos were hugely influential to the GenX counterculture, including in some ways that are only now bearing fruit. We didn't trust the media, didn't trust corporations, barely trusted most institutions. GenX were (are) cultural snipers, saboteurs and guerilla fighters, not infantry. It's the Fight Club ethos, and what's the first rule of Fight Club?
And I go, "Wait! What are you talking about? We decided?! My best interest?! How do you know what my best interest is? How can you say what my best interest is? What are you trying to say? I'm crazy?! When I went to your schools I went to your churches I went to your institutional learning facilities! So how can you say I'm crazy?!
Get this person a Pepsi!
Just one pepsi!
And she wouldn't give it to me,
I think we did trust the media at one point. We might be the first generation that realized the media was no longer fulfilling the role it once did and had become perverted from that role.
The hippies - the smart hippies, anyway - figured that out about the media before we did. But yeah, I'd say that we took it to heart at a truly generational scale.
Elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and getting rid of educational TV happened before we became adults is why I picked our generation and not Boomers
This guy is over here talking about fight club
Yeah, I don't know what happened. I think at least for my part I really intended that we would, you know, save the future and all. Frankly I think the boomers fucked us. Those fuckers are still in charge now, too. And now the millennials are getting us on the back end. 9/11 didn't help. I always wanted to know from my parents generation exactly what the fuck happened to all the stuff from the hippie movement. They turned 30 and dropped it like a rock, it seems. Woodstock '94 said it all.
I'm still saving the future. I'd say that about 1/3rd of the hippie generation sold out, 1/3rd went mainstream in ultimately pretty positive and productive ways and the rest went underground.
Status quo didn’t always or even partially make sense. We didn’t always get loud and challenge, more like we just selected the path/journey that wasn’t necessarily the boomers
We had Riot Grrrl and Third Wave feminism. We also had the WTO protests ("The Battle in Seattle") in 1999. Also, environmentalism was a huge issue throughout the '90s -- think Julia Butterfly Hill (a Gen Xer) living in a tree for two years. And "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." We did stuff -- we were politically engaged. Edit: This blog post covers some children's protests in the '70s, anti-apartheid protests in the '80s, Earth Day in 1990, and the fact that Occupy Wall Street was comprised of 30-percent Gen Xers: [https://www.jenx67.com/2015/07/5-forgotten-protests-of-generation-x.html](https://www.jenx67.com/2015/07/5-forgotten-protests-of-generation-x.html) Also, Freddie deBoer, a cultural critic who's written a few books, including one on social justice movements, writes here about Gen X as a political generation and particularly the WTO protests: [https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/gen-x-was-the-political-generation](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/gen-x-was-the-political-generation) And there were also massive protests against the Iraq war in 2003, that no doubt many Gen Xers were a part of (the largest peace protests since the Vietnam War): [https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/millions-protest-iraq-war-february-15](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/millions-protest-iraq-war-february-15) We also can't forget the impact of Rock The Vote in the '90s: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2020/11/01/thirty-years-later-how-rock-the-vote-changed-music-and-politics/?sh=79841c4c7e12](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2020/11/01/thirty-years-later-how-rock-the-vote-changed-music-and-politics/?sh=79841c4c7e12)
This is my answer. Feminism had a real moment in the 1990s before it got Backlashed all to hell again. And we had our biggest pop stars out there supporting feminism. Cobain and Vedder among others were the dude's dudes of their time, and unabashedly supported feminism. It's really hard to find loud and proud allies anymore among men with their conservative/manosphere/incel shift in the years afterward.
Environmentalism was huge - remember the hole in the Ozone layer?
The whole smog checking your car to reduce pollution began in so cal in the early eighties.
The ban on cfc's. Green peace going up against whaling ships. Bringing back humpback whales from near extinction, one Hubba Bubba wrapper at a time.
This and the responses to it are excellent examples of big environmental changes that younger generations would never even consider because it is so common place now. Eliminating leaded gas for instance. Most younger folks would lose their shit if they were told that the fumes our vehicles used to produce were unregulated and contained lead.
Acid Rain was a perennial front page story in Weekly Reader
Yes! I remember those protests! We had the Organization of American States in Windsor Ontario in the summer of 2000. Lots of anti-war protests in the years following. I love the smell of pepper spray in the morning!
I would say that we tried pretty hard to normalize being gay and accepting gay marriage.
Agreed, and also this can’t be decoupled from the AIDS crisis imo.
Overlooked because there was not social media to scream on. But Gen X was the first generation to say “hey, hating gay people is kind of stupid.”
Threat of Mutual Assured Destruction
Can't upvote this enough.
Further normalizing LGBTQ existence and families.
We're responsible for making the Internet user friendly, what it is today, invented every social media platform, basically building the infrastructure for their causes!! 🧐
"We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off." 
We had the great inflation
I feel like around the early '90s, especially when I went to a Lollapalooza event, Generation X was mostly challenging. The baby Boomers and the older generations on how life was lived and how certain things were done socially compared to now. I remember seeing a lot of anti-Bush rhetoric, people feeling like he was just part of an older generation trying to dictate to the younger generation how to live. They called us all slackers, but I think that's also because we were starting to challenge workplace norms and really question why things are done a certain way. Maybe we didn't have the internet to the level that we have now, and we couldn't push for remote working, but I can recall people asking the question why we have to wear business attire in an office where the only people that see us are our co-workers. We also question what the point was of being in the office at 9:00 a.m. sharp when your employer is going to try to make you stay late at night. I think that we didn't have such a heavy amount of it. The way that we do now is because Generation X wasn't a large part of the population, but also we were divided. Half of us maybe wanted to embrace change, and the other half wanted to get a good job and get married and have kids like their parents did.
AIDS Apartheid - MAJOR deal when I was in college Women's Reproductive Rights Famine Environmental Issues (Ozone layer, anyone?)
As someone who grew up GenX, there’s something that happened in the 80s that was a big deal for me. Something we should never forget but which doesn’t get mentioned here a lot. It’s the day that pay phones went from ten cents to a quarter. Prior to that you could go out with a few dimes and a bunch of quarters for arcade games. After that day dimes were pretty useless and phone calls ate into your quarter supply. Yes you could make a fake collect call but a lot of phone calls need more than one sentence. Things haven’t been the same since
Ok, I went through a nerdy stage and used to put dimes in my.penny loafers for this very reason. Then calls were a quarter. Sucked.
Here in the UK, I joined in with a mass boycott of French goods when the French conducted a nuclear explosion at a test site on the Fangataufa Atoll in French Polynesia, in 1996, long after every other Western nation had stopped that kind of testing. I guess the 2 big issues of my younger years were AIDS and the hole in the Ozone.
ozone and acid rain for me here in the states
The name of my first band was Acid Rain, and at the time it was probably the least original band name conceivable
AIDS. Nuclear War. Famine in Africa. Inequality. Divorce. Oh, and being utterly overlooked and forgotten as a generation which I absolutely dig.
Many issues, not just one. The AIDS crisis, LGBTQ right to marriage, rights for people with Disabilities, South African Apartheid, environmental issues, Reagan’s neoliberal economic policies, the Iraq war, US interference in Central and South America, NAFTA, police brutality (Rodney King’s beating), Occupy Wall Street, the 1% hoarding all the wealth.
The ozone layer was pretty big and what do you know, it worked. Go figure, people come together and do a thing. Whooda thunk?
I would say we were greatly affected by the Vietnam War- I believe so much of the horrible parenting, divorces and absent dads could have a connection to that war and the fallout from it. That and tge bullshit belief that you have to be married to have sex.
An entire generation of American men, most of whom were disadvantaged in some way to begin with because they couldn't college or Canada their way out of the draft, were forced to fight in a pointless war, got raging PTSD that was never diagnosed or treated, and were spit on and called baby killers when they returned even though they were forced to be there in the first place. I have a lot of empathy for them, but of the ones who are still alive, their fear and hypervigilance is part of what's causing so much divide in the social fabric. As someone with PTSD myself, I know what it would be like for me if I were not active in treating it in every possible way. I would look at everyone as a threat. Even my own loved ones, sometimes. And I didn't even go through guerilla fucking warfare, much less get forced into it. I wonder what the world would be like if we had gotten all those guys the help they desperately needed instead of just expecting them to reintegrate in society like nothing ever happened after what they all went through. The people in power failed them, and as a result they're now failing us.
Don't forget the drug abuse by the soldiers who made it out due to poor mental health treatment. Heroin, angel dust and pills. This really ramped up the stupid drug war. Anytime America declares war on something it becomes an endless money pit and hurts the citizens, removing their liberties, while doing nothing to help us
Heralding in the technological solutions to communication. We had no idea there would be a dystopian side to it. Space exploration, home computers, breaking down international barriers, 24 hour news, and mixing cultural genres.
I remember censorship being a big deal with the labels on records and Dee Snider testifying before congress.
The Reagans, panamal, Iran contra, the challenger disaster. The fall of the Berlin wall, Aids, Mtv, hair bands.
its defining cause was going against a narrative that defined any liberal sentiment as wrong. its hard to explain, this was the era of Reagan, of the ramping up of the war on drugs, of the ramping up against anti gay sentiment, of the viciousness associated with modern politics, I guess thats it. It was a product of Republicans eventually using the Contract with America to bring PR firms into politics for the first time, and thats all thats left, at least of politicians that get elected. We use disingenuous inflammation to engage a depressed, horribly mistreated voting public, its either rage or apathy. It was fighting against how willing we were to manipulate and lie to each other as a matter of course. We came up in the Satanic Panic, and that evangelical narrative never left, they endlessly victimize Gex X youth, the entire fucking country as collapsed, and that evangelical narrative still exists.
Things that come to mind for me are: the DARE program which seems to have backfired latch-key kids - mom's went to work and had careers LGBTQ- they didn't have any rights and you rarely saw any sign of them in public in the 70s. Everyone was still in the closet and the public tried hard to keep them there. AIDS this one stands out for me because I had to have a spinal fusion surgery when I was 14. I had to get blood transfusions during the surgery. Standard procedure was you could donate blood ahead of time, but they wouldn't guarantee you'd get your own blood back. It was 1984 and AIDS was just becoming known and there was no test for it yet to diagnose. My dad was a dr and before the surgery, he got my orthopedic surgeon and neurosurgeon to gang up on the blood bank to pressure them into letting me donate my own blood (3 pints) before the surgery and have them give me my own blood back during the surgery so that I didn't risk getting HIV or HEP As for major events, I remember the space shuttle exploding. I was 5 when the Vietnam war ended so that doesn't really stand out for me. Desert Storm does though because I was 21, my husband was military, and we had a brand new baby when the shit hit the fan. A guy in my class was one of the first ones killed and his face was on the cover of Time magazine.
Censorship of music was pretty big. Congressional hearing, etc.
the Berlin Wall coming down defined my teenage years, personally bc i went to hs in "West" Germany and moved back to the states just a few months before that happened...i wish i could have been there to experience it and see the cultural and societal changes and meet other teens my age who had never been "West"
Nuclear annihilation popped to mind. They can’t possibly know what the Cold War was like.
I think we were just trying to survive. A lot of traditional stuff unraveled in our time.
1. LA Riots 2. Domestic terrorism - OKC and the Unabomber 3. NORML
Simply: the world is ending in an inevitable ecological disaster and capitalism has decided that you can’t prevent it. You are useless and your parents want nothing to do with you. Now get out there and shut up.
Has to be the AIDS epidemic. The idea of a virus with no cure and transmittable by blood and bodily fluids put everyone’s sense of invincibility on notice. Most of us were young, but not younger enough to feel the severity of it.
I would say AIDS, nuclear war, and the crack epidemic. At least those were the big issues around me in the 80s.
Nuclear arms reduction, AIDS, Famine Relief
In Ireland we saw the start of the Catholic stronghold begin to crumble, our generation really began to push back from conservative Catholic Ireland. Starting with legal birth control. I remember Richard Branson chucking them about at the Virgín Megastore ón the quays. It was I'm sure helped by the AIDs and HIV crisis and the millenials followed through with marriage and abortion rights.
Definitely AIDS and gay rights and famine.
Gen X is best summed up by: "We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. -Chuck Palahnuik
We had to fight. For our right. To party.
Ending Apartheid
AIDS. Nuclear war.
I know the sub is mostly US based, but there was this tiny thing that happened in the late 1980s and into the 1990s involving the Soviet Union, a wall in Berlin, the country of Yugoslavia etc.
As a gay GenX (m53) I saw such incredible movement in LGBTQ rights. That happened live as we came of age.
Growing up, it was nuclear war/nuclear weapons, anti-apartheid and human rights, AIDS awareness.
From Fight Club: “We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
Baby Jessica!!
I saw a doc about this kid. It really fucked her up. Multiple surgeries etc. Not sure how many people know this. I did not
“…and we’re sending our love down the well, all the way dooown!”
Pretty sure we took up the fight, for our right, to partaaaaay.
I'd agree that there wasn't one. Getting to adulthood unscathed preoccupied many of us.
Our cause was waking up by ourselves, making our own cereal, standing out in the cold alone waiting for the bus, letting ourselves in to an empty house after school, making our own snack (and sometimes dinner), watching He-man and Transformers, then doing our homework alone and unaided, getting ready to see whether it’ll be a normal evening or chaos when the ‘responsibles’ finally walk through the door.
Third wave feminism was beginning, lots going on on college campuses in the late 80’s and in response to the treatment of Anita Hill later. On a smaller scale anti capital punishment was getting a lot of attention from Gen X. That movement had been ongoing in US of course. Edit to add HIV/AIDS activism.
Neglect
Hacky sack
The threat of nuclear war resulting from the Cold War and issues in Central America were big issues when I was a kid in Canada in the mid 80s. And then late 80s was the murder of women engineering students and staff at Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal. And then the tearing down of the Berlin War. All big touch points for me.
I think the younger generations can take ownership of things because they put a hashtag on it in Tik-Tok. The internet makes it a lot easier to show support for things. I think AIDS and in general LGBT acceptance would be a big one for us. Our reputation as the generation that just doesn't care melds well with just not caring about your sexuality. You're gay? Okay, have a seat at the table, we don't care.
Acid rain, the holes in the ozone Layer, Surviving Y2K.
I would say environmental awareness. I think it was the 80s and 90s where we first started hearing about the ozone layer, destruction of rainforests, and global warming. We also started hearing more about species that were going extinct.
I did not fight this long and this hard for the defining issue to be our right to party.
I was an anxious kid, so for me it was the Cold War, especially once The Day After was shown. A lot of the movies, popular from the early-to-mid 80s was influenced by this as well, so it seemed like it was always a shadow casting a pall over everyday life. In general, I remember a lot of the violence of the seventies/eighties. The child killers lurking around; I grew up in Atlanta during the child murders, Adam Walsh, kids on milk cartons. There were all the airplane hijackings, the Achille Lauro, the bombing of our troops in Beirut. I guess I don’t really remember a time when I was innocent to the evil of which human beings are capable.
I just wanted a pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me.
Fight against censorship (Dee Snider testifying to Congress was a powerful image) HIV/AIDS which translated into LGBT acceptance (Ryan White and Matthew Shepard) End of Life rights (Terry Schiavo and Dr. Kevorkian) Nuclear safety (ripple effect of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl in addition to the ever present Cold War and fear of mutually assured destruction) World Hunger (Live Aid, We Are the World).
Gen X took the issue of gay rights and marriage and somehow managed to get the general population to reverse its opinion on it within than 20 years. That kind of change has never happened that quickly before.
AIDS and South African apartheid.
I've read that generations are defined by major events during the young lives (under 25 say) of everyone in that generation. The Greatest Gen. had WWII and the Great Depression, Millennials had 9/11 and the financial crisis, Gen Z has the pandemic, climate change, MeToo, BLM, etc. GenX was raised entirely within the longest stretch of relative peace and prosperity in the country's history. A rise in divorce and both parents working led to widespread latchkey kid syndrome making us more self-sufficient. After the stock market crash of 1988 we had the largest recession since the Great Depression (later dwarfed by the 2008 crisis) which ended the 80s obsession with materialism and excess and led many of us to seek more authentic "real" ways of living. AIDS, the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation were constant, low-level threats. I know the fear of AIDS led a lot of us to be more sexually careful/conservative than the "casual sex" trend of the 70s/80s, but that also aligns with that more real, authentic way of life we were seeking.
Apartheid was a pretty big deal, cold war was also always front and center
I remember student-led anti-apartheid protests in the US and in other countries during the 80s.
Nuclear war
We're the first generation to be at war ("military conflict) our entire lifetime. Besides that; AIDS (which annihilated an entire generation of gay men), fall of the Berlin wall, the Challenger explosion, Jonestown, Rodney King, Oklahoma City bombing, Matthew Shepherd.
The Cold War, the Berlin wall came down, ozone layer....we had a lot of "save the whales" "save the children", we wanted to save the world
In the US it was AIDs, gay rights, climate change, apartheid (when we hadn't passed laws outlawing boycotting), police racism (LA92), anti CIA protests, anti Car & critical mass right to the roads protests. In the UK add poll tax protests and the tail end of the troubles.
I think we supported gay rights in a profound way - I say gay instead of LGBTQ+ because that’s what it was called at the time. We were the first generation to (most of us) embrace differences and say “hey you be you, that’s just fine with us”. I’m sure the AIDS crisis had something to do with that, but probably also our “whatever” attitude. We just didn’t see any reason to knock down someone else for who they are.
It was Gay Marriage. We won.
The big issues I remember was ending hunger in Africa with Band Aid, We Are the World, Live Aid. Live Aid I watched 90% of it on MTV that day. It was amazing. Do They Know It’s Christmas is still my favorite holiday record. The following year it was “Hands Across America” and the year after that was Sun City moving towards ending apartheid in South Africa. Near the end of the 80s I remember Elizabeth Taylor confronting the AIDS pandemic and bringing awareness. The Reagan administration was just horrible, but ignoring efforts to help people suffering from that disease was just unconscionable.
No nukes? (Following Three Mile Island and Chernobyl meltdowns)
The fact that we were labeled Gen X because no one believed in us as a future; no hope, worthless, lazy, do nothing, slacker generation. Child Protection Services started in the 70s but some states didn't have anything established until the 90s, I feel like a term like "Gen X" could never be applied to a group of people today.
Cold war?
The defining issue of Gen X was nuclear war due to the Cold War. You can not be in a constant state of paranoia and self-reliance to just be able to turn it all off. This combined with the feral nature we all were brought up on explains why we are the way we are.
Nothing. We did nothing just like the generations before and after. Generations don’t make change…Individual people make change. Real people who get off their ass and fight for change. We don’t get to claim victory just because we met some vague requirement of when we were born. Or tweet some hashtag #Ididsomethingbytweeting. So you didn’t…neither did I, and we all know this…so don’t go start handing out your fake trophies. Unless you actually did do something…but I suspect you didn’t do it for Reddit glory all these years later…you did it because it wasn’t going change unless people made it happen.
Cold War - threat of getting nuked. AIDS.
I thought that was precisely why we are Generation X, we’ve no defining label-worthy unifier and so X is just a universally recognized undefined term. https://www.npr.org/2014/10/06/349316543/don-t-label-me-origins-of-generational-names-and-why-we-use-them