Back in the day, when VH1 primarily showed music videos, it had a segment dedicated to music from the 1960s where they would show iconic images of the decade set to songs like Smokey Robinsons The Tears of a Clown or The Whos My Generation. Even though I was a Gen Xer, I loved the music of those who had come before me, as the sounds of the 60s spoke to all the anxieties of that time war, assassinations, rampant violence and discrimination, and civil unrest mixed with the new anxieties of the late 80s into the 1990s. That time brought us the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic, the last terrifying gasps of the Cold War until the Berlin Wall fell, the looming recession and fears around war in the Middle East.

It was a turbulent time, just as it had been for those who had come before. But for some reasons, instead of seeing the similarities between what led to the Civil Rights, anti-war and anti-poverty movements of the 1960s and 70s, many publications and people were focused on shaming Gen X for being unmotivated slackers who only wanted their MTV and not much else.

But why the obsession with Gen Xs perceived failures when we were still just kids? Why were we being compared to boomers anyway? Did people even write elaborate treatises on how the the Greatest Generations stiff upper lip had been oh-so-much stiffer than their more sexually liberal, idol-smashing scions, or was this all more recent, tied to the advent of television and other game-changing technology that had rapidly developed post the Industrial Revolution? How did we even get started talking about generations when, in the end, theyre mostly meaningless concoctions that divide us and explain almost nothing?

If Gen X was the first generation, fueled by cynicism, to stare into the abyss, unblinking and unimpressed, then we wouldnt (and couldnt) be the last. Because it was never about us being the generation of disappointment compared to our successful Boomer parents. Literally most generations in American society had known mostly disappointment with slow, stymied progress. Boomers were the outliers, but not for the reasons they or the media told us but because they got to benefit from something no generation before them and no generation after ever got.

A break.

The Civil War left the U.S. in shambles. WWI and isolationism took its toll. The Great Depression did no one any favors, but it did do one solid for boomers it was so bad that a plurality of the public, government, and industry were aligned on how it couldnt happen again, so labor unions were strengthened, laws were passed and protections were put in place after the collapse of the stock market, and those changes were in favor ofregular people with jobs. The creation of those protections continued well into Lyndon B. Johnsons Great Society plan.