(PJ Media) The historic election of Donald J. Trump to his second term rests at the feet of a generation of unsung heroes. Data shows that if you want to thank someone today for pulling America back from the brink of more Democrat malfeasance, you should thank a GenXer.
This is fascinating. Any hot takes on why Gen X decided the election? https://t.co/ONhg2HR8ft pic.twitter.com/eVw20W84Az
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) November 6, 2024
I am a proud GenXer. I grew up running wild until the street lights came on, unsupervised, unchained, independent, and free. When I was seven years old, I would go get my four-year-old neighbor, and we would walk two blocks up and across a busy street to the White Hen to buy candy before heading to the park, where we played all day with no adults anywhere in sight. At a young age, I was left home alone and came home to an empty house when my parents were working. I learned to cook for myself, entertained myself, and never, EVER admitted I was bored, lest my mother assign chores. I was given specific lies to tell people who called asking for my parents when they weren’t home. “She’s in the shower. Can I take a message?” I had my TV lineup for after school, which included “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island.”
My generation is unnervingly quiet. No one talks about us. We don’t make the headlines very often, and we generally like it that way. Left alone for so much of our childhoods, we enjoy being left alone. We own “alone.”
One of the reasons no one notices us is that Millennials take up all the air in the room. For one, they dwarf us in size; secondly, they’re often very loud and whiny. When Millennials entered the workplace, they caused no end of annoyance for everyone around them, demanding special treatment, coffee bars, mental health days, pronouns, and other things GenXers thought were lame. They job-hopped and created article after article about “How to Keep Millenials Happy” while we put our heads down and made our careers, often in the same company for our entire work lives.
GenX is the last generation raised without smart technology. We were wild and untethered to the approval of strangers on the internet. GenX doesn’t care what you think about us. We learned that skill on the playgrounds of the ’70s and ’80s. If you weren’t there, you can’t appreciate how dangerous that actually was. When we weren’t dodging rusted metal edges of slides, we were suffering the verbal assaults of the schoolyard bullies that often escalated to physical fights. The adults in charge did not care to intervene. We were regularly told, “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.”
Movies made for kids back then were full of expletives and violence. We might not have used that language in front of adults, but around the neighborhood, there wasn’t a kid who didn’t know every four-letter word out there. Some of us memorized the raunchiest parts of Eddie Murphy’s “RAW,” and I bet there are a few of you reading this right now who can rattle off George Carlin’s 7 dirty words. Words are just words. And we believe in defending all those words, whether we use them or not.
We revere free speech, and Generation X has become a fierce defender of all the words we’re not supposed to say. We don’t believe in the power of words to harm anyone. We don’t think participation trophies are worth anything, either. Winning and losing were very clearly defined on those playgrounds. There were winners and losers, nerds and popular kids, and it was up to us to battle it out and survive.
