Welcome To The Jungle

In his 1995 book, Welcome To The Jungle: The Why Behind "Generation X," author Geoffrey T. Holtz looks at how his generation got to where it is ... and seems to decide it's everyone else's fault.

It's unfortunate how Holtz works this book, because a lot of good research and salient points can be, and probably have been, easily dismissed by critics as mere Xer whining. Which, at times, is what it seems like. While not sharing the dim view of his generation that such Boomer pessimists as Neil Howe and Bill Strauss made famous in 13th Gen, Holtz buys into their idea that our generation was destinated to fail and puts on the smog-colored glasses hook, line and sinker. OK, so he didn't see the economic expansion taking place around him in the mid-1990s or the ephemeral light at the end of the tunnel that was the Internet revolution, but perhaps doing so would have worked against his angle.

When not lashing out at the Boomers, the media or national politicians, Holtz works in some thought-provoking observations. He targets the marketing of the birth-control pill in 1960 as the moment that ends the baby boom and begins the X age. He dredges up the Zero Population Growth movement that temporarily gained momentum and convinced journalists that the nation would be in peril if it continued to follow the birth rate of the baby boom. Holtz also looks at the anti-kid trend in popular culture: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, children embodied a dangerous evil in such flicks as Rosemary's Baby, The Omen series, The Exorcist, Demon Seed and The Boys From Brazil.

Holtz goes over what has become familiar territory among my thesis research about how our generation dealt with an explosion of divorce rates, relied on TV as a babysitter and witnessed the breakdown of institutions that may have launched our legendary cynicism. He also looks at child poverty, failure of public school systems and the use of drugs like Ritalin to control or contain youngers instead of trying to help them.

There is a brief section that raises the statistic that "[b]y 1988, the rate at which young people were killing themselves was double that of 1970 and triple the 1960 rate, becoming the second-leading cause of death for the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old age group." This kind of theme ties into my "junior" year (the time of upheaval and conflict) as well as the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain. As mentioned in a previous post, calling Cobain the voice of his generation rings inaccurate, but that he was one of so many Xers who committed (or a larger number who attempted) suicide says a lot about the "jungle" many young adults have navigated.

In all, Welcome To The Jungle serves as an intriguing companion piece to Meredith Bagby's Rational Exuberance. They almost represent two sides of a coin: Holtz sees society and previous generations ruining the future prospects of Generation X, while Bagby sees Xers triumphing over the limitations placed upon them by society and previous generations. Much has changed since they wrote their books, but placing their analyses side-by-side in print shows an interesting diversity of opinion on the prospects of Generation X by some of its writers.