On Gen-X Origins and Things Taken for Granted

It's always the third generation...

My mother was a Wykhoff. She was a descendant of one of the earliest Dutch Brooklyn patriarchs. Pieter Claesen Wyckoff came to Flatbush in 1642 as an indentured servant. His great grandson fought in the Continental Army as a colonel. He was General Washington’s guide at the battle of Brooklyn during the escape through the Hudson fog that saved Washington’s army and the fate of the Revolution. His ancestors went on to fight in every American war. The Wykhoff House still stands today. It’s the oldest building in New York City.

My wife is a Bennett. The Bennetts were at Jamestown. They were the merchants that owned and captained the ships that brought supplies to the colonists from Europe. One of the first recorded English marriages in America was between my wife’s (great?) grandfather and a woman named Alice Pierce. She was a widow whose husband was killed in one of the first Native American raids. The Bennetts survived. One would be the governor of Virginia. Another would serve in the House of Burgesses with the great grandfather of George Washington.

My Mother-in Law is Mexican American. A quarter of my wife’s DNA comes from Native American tribes whose origins in America date back 12 thousand years. A quarter of her is Spanish. Her ancestors were victims of genocide brought on by her other ancestors. My first American ancestor was Dutch but my name isn’t Dutch. And neither am I for the most part. My name is Irish. But I’m not that Irish either. My latest arriving American ancestor was. He came to work the Allegheny blast furnaces from somewhere in the west of Ireland shortly after the potato famine and melted into the 19th century industrial American steel machine.

Some of my children’s ancestors fought for the American Revolution. Some fought for the Confederacy. Some fought for the Union. Some of them enslaved African Americans. Some of them were members of long gone Native American tribes. Some fled from famine. Some immigrated from Mexico to East L.A. where their children enlisted to fight for America in WWII. Some were forced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodgers Stadium. Go Padres.

As fantastical as our lineage sounds, it’s not. 12 generations in what we now call America gives us about 10 thousand grandparents born along the way. Some of them were bound to have interesting stories. And since the interesting ones are the ones history remembers, when we search, we’re left with a sense of distinguished lineage. Or a catastrophic one. The survivors regressed to the cultural mean of American suburbia over time though. The mean for people who were white, or white enough, to not have been locked out of the economy and social structure for ten generations.

What’s most remarkable about all of this is that neither my wife nor I knew any of this until recently. We knew nothing that predated our grandparents. Our familial memories only went back two generations. And even for that we only knew places, names and maybe the sorts of work our grandparents did. The rest melted into the suburban lawns and sidewalks of 70s and 80s America. We derived no sense of identity or origin from our ancestry. We found out about it by researching on Ancestry.com, 23 and Me and in digitized newspaper archives.

The late 20th century America that Generation-X, my generation, grew up in grew from hundreds of years of chaos, tumult and progress that landed us post-Civil Rights Act and post-Title IX. It was a chaos that was invisible to most of us. We grew up only remembering the Sorkin-esque presidencies of Reagan, Bush and Clinton. We grew up thinking (wrongly) that legislation was the end of the civil rights and gender equality fights, not the beginning. Growing up Gen-X was growing up as the first generation to reach adulthood after the end of Fukuyama’s history.

We got off history’s train in a suburban America of split level houses, kids on bikes and shopping malls. Modern medical care; free education; grocery stores; shopping malls; an unrecognizable standard of living from ancestors we’d never heard of that lived less than a century before us in the same place. No one was growing their own food. No one was building their own houses. Everything we owned was bought. Every household was connected to the same content we were fed on cable television. The heterodoxy and echo chambers of the internet was decades away.

By the 1980s, over half of all Americans lived in suburban neighborhoods. When our parents were born it was less than a quarter. Between our parents childhoods and ours, 83% of American population growth happened in suburbs. Only a quarter of Americans were left in rural areas. And another quarter in the inner cities. The cultural center, where the TV shows and advertising revenue was focused, was suburbia, white suburbia, and had been since before we were born.

When I met my wife in a country bar on dollar beer night in San Diego 20 years ago, despite never being within 2800 miles of each other for all but three weeks of our lives, we had pretty much the same childhood. We’d grown up in the same place. Not geographically. But culturally. We were somewhere in the fat part of the bell curve close to and slightly to the right of the mean. The mean that had been a rocket ship to the stars.

Every generation has it’s disease though. Generation X, my generation, grew up with some evidence that the hard collective fights were behind us. That the end of history was here. That we’d won. Our grandparents built late 20th century America. Our parents inherited and fought to grow it. And we assumed it. It’s the third generation, they say, that tears it down through entitlement and naivety. Of course the fights weren’t behind us. And of course we hadn’t won. That wasn’t obvious to many of us though. We hadn’t succeeded in creating one place. We’d mostly grown the one place big enough and for long enough to make it easier to ignore the rest of America.

As shock after shock has hit us in adulthood, I’ve been unable to shake a sinking feeling that so many of my fellow Gen-Xers suffer from the same failure of imagination that I do. A failure to imagine a world where 9/11 was possible. A failure to imagine 20 years of war would ensue. A failure to imagine a Trump presidency. A failure to imagine the pandemic. The failure was less that we should have been able to predict these events discreetly. The failure was to be unable to understand that these sorts of events were possible, even likely, over time. A failure driven by a belief that the world lived in the suburbs of America; a failure to believe anything other than when the dust settled from upheaval, that we’d all just go back to the way it was. And that the way it was, was how it was for everyone.

It was so easy to believe that the massive challenges of the new millennia were all just speed bumps on a flat and easy road towards progress and unity; a road that just went there on its own. The Gen-X disease is a failure to imagine that the stability of the 80’s and 90’s was actually what was strange. The fight we didn’t see coming is the one to define what comes next. And that the answer probably isn’t going to be what came last.

This year I started a project to chronicle the path of Generation X. This is the focus of my next book. This winter and spring I’m hosting a series of discussions with the Interintellect on the topics of my generation.

There’s not much talk about Gen X these days. The culture wars between zoomers and boomers and millennials rages on. The oldest of Gen X just turned 55 last year though. I suspect that means something .