If you’re at all interested in this subject, you should immediately pick up a book called “Generations: the history of America’s future 1583-2063″ by Strauss & Howe. Read the section on “Reactive Generations”…and keep in mind that this book was written in 1989. There are also a couple of excellent sequels: “Abort, Retry, Fail” (about my generation in particular), and “The Fourth Turning” (about the crisis period we’ve just entered into).

One of the key points made in that book is that following every “awakening” in US history (which the sixties counter-culture was one) has been a “Reactive/Nomad” generation of children who were essentially thrown away and ignored. Those of us born in the late sixties and early seventies know that all too personally.

We grew up in a world that was focused on adult problems and concerns. Children were ignored at best, and demonized at worst. My generation is the most-aborted in human history, and it shows in our numbers: 35 million vs 83 million Baby Boomers. We were “latchkey kids” who lived a Tom Sawyer-esque childhood (Mark Twain was a Reactive). We were treated as disposable from very early on, and often left to raise ourselves while the adults got on with wrecking the world around us. All the wealth and opportunity provided by their parents to the Baby Boomers was mostly closed off to us as they squandered it on themselves. Alienation was what we had left. We’ve been denigrated as stupid, worthless, and evil from the time we were toddlers.

Does that sound like hyperbole? It may to modern ears, but a close look at how our society treated its children during the 1965-1980 period reveals the truth. We know. We were there.

As our society changed its mind about children in the 1980s, suddenly finding them precious butterflies, its rancor stayed focused on us as we aged: a new lost generation of worthless teenagers, slackers, and bums: Generation X. The alienation reached a crescendo in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at which point our society seems to have written us off for good as a bad job.

Like other Reactive/Nomad generations before us (The Lost Generation, the Gilded Generation, and the Liberty Generation), we turned society’s disdain for us back on itself. Normal avenues of success closed off to us, we did an end-run around the established power structure so clogged with our predecessors (internet economy, anyone?) and they’re still dealing with the fallout from that. We flourished in the arts as rogues and have always had a better sense of what’s “cool” than others older or younger. We became intensely focused on and protective of our personal spheres: friends and family.

Now that the consequences of our predecessors’ poor choices are coming back to roost, we are entering middle age and history is about to deal us yet another sucker punch. Our prime earning years will be marred by a massive crisis and economic upheaval.

Not that we didn’t expect that. It’s common to find people in my age group who remember being told from a very early age that things like Social Security wouldn’t ever be there for us. That was the message from the time we were born: You’re on your own, kid…get used to it.

Fair enough. We’ll see how that plays out now that the rest of society is going to find itself dependent on us for survival.

But most of us, despite the alienation and suspicion and renegade behavior, have grown up. Many of us have families (I do) and are remarkably stable, level-headed people. Strauss & Howe mention in their book that Reactive/Nomad generations become “the ideal fifty-year-olds” as they hit middle age and are called upon to save a society in crisis: clever, nobody’s fools, able to make hard choices and carry them out with cold efficiency, but deeply perceptive, compassionate and full of humor. I hope to live up to that, myself.

If the historic pattern holds, we’ll be called on to sacrifice nearly everything to save our society from itself, even though we’ve got the short end of the stick on every interaction we’ve ever had with that society. Afterward, when (if) the job is done, others will take the credit and shove us to the sidelines as obstacles to progress: hard-bitten old cynics who just don’t “get it.”

The crazy thing is, we always suspected it was going to turn out this way. Want to hear someone really trash-talk Gen-X? Ask another Gen-Xer. The Baby Boomers treat us will little more than condescension as always, but are too busy feeling sorry for themselves and fighting the culture wars to really get their hate on. Our kids don’t really know what to make of us, jaded, cynical, and loving as we are. But deep down, many of us still can’t escape the thought that maybe society was justified in its multi-decade disdain for us. Self-hatred can be a powerful force.

Just ask Kurt Cobain.

But I think you, like me, may be paradigmatic, as experience has made us tough. There is hope yet. Keep the faith, brother, our Lord had to pass through the grave to achieve his victory! I believe that is where we are, right now, shut up in the tomb. Yet… strange… my spirit is not defeated, nor yours.

In the sun _ in the sun i feel as one
In the sun – in the sun
I’m married
Buried

I wish i was like you
Easily amused
Find my nest of salt i dont care what he says the lyrics are, listen-its FEMINIST ASSAULT when he sings it
Everythings my fault
I’ll take all the blame
Aqua seafoam shame
Sun burn with freezerburn
Choking on the ashes of her enemies

In the sun – in the sun i feel as one
In the sun – in the sun
I’m married
Buried
Married
Buried
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

All in all is all we all are
…

However, as damaging as that policy was to me personally, I have come to the realization that the beatings dished out to white boys at the time were fully condoned by older white men who just didn’t give a damn, and these older white guys – mostly boomers – would still have our asses kicked in hallways if they had their way. A truly disgusting generation of white men had it in their power to help children, but punished them instead. It wasn’t the blacks who determined policy, or even the women, or the Jews, but rather some egotistical bastards who are now getting old yet still have a lock-down on national politics as well as the economy. It was really about their power, and in many cases their own immoral desires.

Choosing life is important. I try to do so by working for the benefit of the next generation. The old men who tossed us all this garbage, however, never gave a damn about anyone but themselves. I know that you disagree with Roissy, but he’s far better than some disgusting “feminist” male politician who feels self-righteous about selling out all his brothers for female adulation and validation from his minority vassals. That is a plantation mentality writ large.

Above all, men need to give up this obsession with women. That doesn’t mean leaving the company of women, avoiding relationships and even family formation. It does mean, however, that the center of your life and your identity must, for reasons of personal sanity, lie elsewhere. I think that this actually holds true for men and women alike in this new world we live in.

I don’t expect we’ll see massive chavism in the US. I do think, though, that relationship patterns will continue to shift, both inside and outside marriage. Men can go with the flow when it comes to that as long as they have their heads screwed on straight and drop their pathetic obsession with women, and start being men again. Men who *do* things, whether these impress women or not.