Forgotten Years

[More prologue, picking up from the previous passage.]

When writing with hindsight, some GenX writers have fixed the failures of previous generations as the bane of the younger set’s existence. One of the most strident of these authors, Geoffrey T. Holtz, believes he and fellow Xers were burdened by an anti-child culture. In Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind ‘Generation X’, Holtz wrote that Generation X’s “defining moment” came in 1960 “with what would be characteristic irony” as the Searle Drug Company began marketing the first birth-control pill to the commercial market. “Never before was it so easy not to have children,” he explained. “America’s attitude toward its youth would undergo a great transformation in the following two decades.” Holtz noted that the end of the generation’s birth years, with the election of Reagan and America’s subsequent turn toward having more children and other conservative values, saw the country moving “back toward tradition and away from experiment.”

But the fiscal conservancy and the tax revolt that took flight in the 1980s meant cutbacks for education funding and social programs to help repair the damage done to Xers by family strife. The result of the overlapping trends Holtz saw as a kind of perfect storm putting his generation into the crosshairs:

Our mothers and fathers exercised their freedom to divorce to the tune of over one million a year, triple the rate of their own parents. Schools demonstrated their freedom to test out a new variety of new, often ill-conceived curricula on us. Politicians and other policy makers felt free to conduct new experiments in spending and funding government operations -- alarmingly often by means that benefited the old at the expense of the young. … Higher education is being priced out of reach for a growing number. Job and income prospects are dismal. … The chances that we’ll surpass our parents’ standard of living are minimal.

While Holtz’s inability to see that prospects for his generation had grown better, not worse, by when his book came out in 1995 (as we will explore later) and his tone approaches that of a conspiracy theorist, he accurately notes other developments supporting his argument. For instance, the beginning of an anti-procreation movement arrived with the publication of Paul Ehlrich’s book The Population Bomb in 1968. “An instant best-seller, it gave readers a somewhat scientific confirmation of the growing belief that our planet and our nation were bursting at the seams,” Holtz observed. Cover stories in such magazines as Life, Newsweek and Science argued against overpopulation and painted nightmare scenarios if readers did not heed the warnings. Ehlrich would found the Zero Population Growth organization to take up the charge, with its membership expanding and reaching more than 700,000 in the 1980s. A survey in 1971 found that about two-thirds of the American public agreed that overpopulation represented “a serious problem” in their nation.

If anyone needed reinforcement that children could be a negative force, all he or she had to do was head to the cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kids represented some kind of evil in movies as Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen series, The Exorcist, Demon Seed, It’s Alive and The Boys from Brazil.