Not Even Not Zen 424: Biomythography - Note 135: On Generation X, Part II

Generation X, Part II

11. We were a generation without serious childhood diseases

I had teachers who were partly crippled by polio. Others bore pock marks or scars from past diseases. Those were fairly rare to see but all the older adults I knew saw their friends and family members die around them or dealt with them partly crippled by disease. The younger adults and I did not.

12. We saw vast improvements in dentistry

My grandfather had all his teeth knocked out before he was thirty-five. My father had less than half of his removed. I’ve had only my wisdom teeth taken out. Over three generations, that's pretty good progress.

Once, tooth removal was the standard of care. Then dentists learned to do root canals. They figured out pain management, too. I experienced my first dentistry under the influence of laughing gas. By the time I was eleven, my dentist replaced it with novacaine. By the time I was twenty-four, I got topical novacaine, too.

Braces improved. Once, only the upper classes could get them. Then various stages of the middle class could afford to straighten their teeth. Now we have expanders to wear instead of knocking out teeth. And we have plastic, 'invisible' braces.

13. Some of us got contact lenses

This is one I wouldn’t have noticed myself. In ages past, someone like me would have wondered why a few others were so bad at fighting or sports. Even in more recent generations, sufferers from poor eyesight had to wear glasses. Everyone could see that you couldn't see.

When our generation reached its teen years, contact lenses became available. They made a difference, socially. They still do. In time, if U.S. insurance companies permit it, corrective surgery could replace contact lenses but we are still in a contact lens era.

14. The Cold War defined our expectations and its end confused us

We read popular books about nuclear armaggedon, prepared for atomic attacks, saw movies starring radioactive creatures, and listened to commentators describe the end of life on earth, which was more or less a weekly feature. Families built backyard fallout shelters. The church hosting my scout meetings had their own fallout shelter. Thanks to the Space Race, I learned binary, octal, and hexadecimal math. Children absorbed the stories about sudden annihilation, fighting the commies with lasers, and fighting atomic bomb survivors with rocks. We assumed the existential threat as background noise to our normal childhoods of playing outside, watching television, and going to school.

When leaders declared the Cold War over, it didn't seem believable. After all, the Cold War had justified our formative life decisions. As it turned out, I'd say we were right to be skeptical.

15. We Grew Up Assigned to Tribes

When Generation X was young, we found ourselves assigned to the European tribal labels or to the labels 'African," 'Asian,' or 'Indian,' each treated as a tribe even though the designations didn't make sense. I was assigned to the 'Irish' tribe because of my last name but, like most Americans, I was descended so thoroughly from a mix of everything European (and a little native American), it wouldn't have made sense to assign me Irish even if I'd grown up in Ireland.

As I child, I realized lumping the Chinese and the Japanese together as one label, when they were so different and very often still hated each other, made no sense. It didn't even attempt to make sense. The same went for Indians like the Hopi and Navajo, traditional enemies, or the Lakota and Pawnee. In fact, the term Indian was inaccurate on so many levels, it was weird to have a friend called an Injun in school. But he called himself an Injun, too. And I called myself Irish.

The way these old designations got replaced by newer dividing lines has given me (and perhaps many others in Generation X) a sense of them being arbitrary.

16. We had superstitions

It's hard to describe how pervasive they were. My uncles described the ghosts in their houses. Grown men in the neighborhood dodged black cats. Women inspected dropped items for omens. Seances were forbidden but popular. Tarot cards got banned. Neighbors put up horseshoes over their doors. Friends bought key chains with rabbit's feet at the end. People believed in luck. They believed in it deeply.

We had no easy way to test our superstitions. They ruled a noticeable sliver of society. I think it may have been all the Space Race education and the tireless work of people like Harry Houdini that brought our superstitions under control.

17. We had insects

Nowadays if you drive anywhere on the east coast, your windshield is clear at the end of your journey. 

That wasn't how my mother drove when I was growing up in Maryland. She hit dozens of bugs every trip. Thousands of them, large and small, died on our windshields every year. Then, one year, she noticed we had been hitting fewer bugs. We had been hitting fewer each year for several years, in fact. 

Finally, we stopped hitting them at all. 

18. We had birds

We had flocks of birds crossing the sky, end to end. I haven't seen flocks as large as those in a long time. You can't have flocks of thousands without food to feed them. The food has to include insects. Now we don't have enough insects. Even if the insecticides hadn't killed millions of birds directly, millions would have died anyway once we lost their food source.

19. We had broadcast television

Broadcast television used (and still uses, but on different bandwidth) radio signals to encode audio and video information. When broadcasts were introduced, coupled with the rasterization in cathode ray tube screens that let us see images, they constituted a form of magic. The television antennas picked up the radio signals, the television hardware decoded them, and we saw whatever shows the local broadcast towers were sending. 

"It's on! It's on!" Our parents would yell. And we came running back from the kitchen whenever we heard the call. We were captive to the timing of those broadcasts.

In my area, we got NBC, ABC, CBS, and an independent station on the standard VHF bands. With a switch on our set, we could move to the UHF bands and decode three stations there, as well. Those include an independent broadcast and two PBS stations. During our lifetimes, satellite television and cable television eventually grew into competitors for broadcasts. For our formative years, though, we saw only broadcast TV.

20. We obtained consumer freedom with videotapes

Plenty of people made video recordings of family birthdays and other, personal events. More, though, recorded shows from broadcast TV. Now VCRs gave them the ability to could build show collections. They could binge-watch the shows on their own schedule. They could fast-forward through the commercials, too. Naturally, the television business hated it. 

By law in the United States, videotapes and cassette tapes had to be sold with a fee included to compensate the authors and other copyright holders. The legislators assumed we would be making a copy not otherwise detectable but still covered by copyright law. It was, in their opinion, a special case and not fair use. Other countries enacted similar laws. They allowed creators to make some money based on societal assumptions. Videotape users hardly noticed since the fees were built into the cost of the tapes.

Later, though, the Supreme Court ruled that private tapes were fair use. This effectively eliminated the U.S. based video levies. 

I've never liked the consequences of removing the levies. They were a useful, civil arrangement. Now we have some people who (rightly) feel they should be able to buy something once and own it. What they do with it afterwards, such as copying it to a cassette, is their own business. We also have creators and copyright holders feeling (rightly, again) that people will misuse the ability to make copies. We could have a societal understanding about how to behave - but we have given up having even the hope of one, it seems.
 

Not Even Not Zen 423: Biomythography - Note 134: On Generation X, Part I

On Generation X, Part I

The defining trait of America's Generation X might be the presence of latchkey kids. Immediately preceding the early 1960s, a generation of mothers stayed home. During Generation X, in contrast, many mothers chose to work in offices. Of course, kids had always been a bit 'free range' in times before. Since the end of child labor, parents had told their children to play outside and not come back until dinner. But Generation X was more free than ever. Mothers no longer patrolled their homes or neighborhoods. Professional daycares had not sprung up. Kids had keys to their houses and the freedom (and responsibility) to care for themselves and their friends.

Normally, I don't see meaningful distinctions between generations. That is, I wouldn't try to single out the times in which people grow up any more than their religions or educational levels or economic situations. Those make some sense to talk about, though. Maybe it's worth thinking about whether there genuinely are lessons to learn from our times and places of origin. Occasionally, we might notice something quite serious to a generational difference, such as the Vietnam War, the killings at Kent State, the presence of latchkey children, or the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Here, in roughly a linear order, are factors I think might define Generation X. I would love to hear different opinions.

1. We raised ourselves as free range kids

As mentioned above, we went outside wandering, drinking through hoses, and meeting strangers in person. Getting lost and finding our way back were factors of our daily lives. Negotiating with other kids to play games was a regular occurrence.

2. We benefited from a civil rights movement

When I was young, grown-ups in the neighborhood got angry about mixed marriages. To them, that meant between Irish (low white) and Italian (colored). The adults stood in groups, berating those unions and the Catholic churches that permitted them. Once, a blonde woman said, "What about the Lovings?" meaning the couple in Virginia. The rest of the group laughed. A man replied, "That's not really a thing." They didn't consider the civil rights movement to be practical.

But they were wrong. It took too long to prove, but it turned out that treating people with equal dignity and equal rights under the law is, in fact, practical.

3. We witnessed assassinations

For sixty years between the killings of Presidents McKinley and Kennedy, Americans didn’t seem to think about eliminating political leaders. Suddenly, after Kennedy, guns became everyone’s solution to differences of opinion. Someone killed Malcolm X. They got the younger Kennedy. Then Martin Luther King. Someone crippled George Wallace. People kept on trying. They wounded Andy Warhol. They murdered Barbara Colby.

Sometimes, as with the plots against Ford, Carter, and Reagan, the shooters didn’t even seem motivated by politics. They simply had easy access to guns and to famous people. Next, a man shot John Lennon. It wasn’t social commentary. It wasn’t personal. Shootings became a form of expression for frustrated people.

4. We grew up naked or nearly so

This one, more than most, probably depends on local circumstances.

In my childhood, we wore very little during the summer. Running around nude was considered normal for babies. Some of us grew up partly in summer camp barracks. We got naked in locker rooms. These thing gave us a different attitude towards our bodies. They gave us a different concept of nudity, too, which wasn’t sexualized. I don’t know for sure if it was healthier or not but I suspect it was.

5. We learned through corporal punishment

While some aspects of society re-started with Generation X, like civil rights and assassinations, some ended with our generation, like being free range kids and receiving corporal punishment.

Beating children had been the main way parents modified behavior for millions of years. When my wife wanted us to join the generational trend of seeking alternatives to spankings, I felt we were taking a risk. And we were. It seemed to pay off. There may be unintended consequences yet from failing to be physical. Raising immoral children doesn't seem to be one of them, though. Our grown kids have good consciences despite a lack of corporal punishment.

6. We made our own meals

They were terrible meals. We made ketchup and cheese sandwiches. We gnawed on warm, mushy apples. We pocketed tangerines and peeled them later, on the playground. Everyone relied on peanut butter and jelly, even the kids who weren’t allowed to spoil their dinner.

I ate hard peaches and crabapples from neighborhood trees. (I threw up, once. You can only eat so many crabapples.) But although most of us didn’t learn much about cooking, we did learn a form of food self-reliance early. There's something to be said for eating plain foods, too. Lots of us were used to doing it.

7. We drew maps

This was a ‘free range’ skill, I suspect. We memorized paths and landmarks. We learned to follow the stream. We buried pirate treasures consisting of our old stuffed animals and cap guns. Then we located the X on our homemade treasure map and dug them up again.

We could glance to the sun and judge our cardinal direction. We knew our mealtimes without a watch. Sometimes we read paper maps. But always, even without them, we found our way home. We found our way around our houses in the dark, too. We hardly thought about it.

8. We didn’t use our safety belts

By the time I was in college, I made a habit of stopping at every car accident I saw to try to help. At an accident in Massachusetts, I met a panicked man marching the other way on the darkened shoulder of the road.

“She’s hanging upside down!” He pointed behind him. I thought he may have been the first bystander on the scene. “I don’t see how we can get her out.”

As I continued, I approached a turned-over sedan. It was resting with its roof on the grass between a guard rail and a strand of trees. Inside, I could see a woman looking anxious. I didn’t see how she could have done this to her car but I didn’t think much more about it, either. Obviously, she had made it happen somehow. I saved most of my amazement for the seatbelt.

It was bewildering that she'd worn one. No one ever did. For Generation X, it wasn't an option in the older cars when we were children. Seat belts came with new models, of course, but no one used them. They weren’t available yet in school buses or public transit. Yet here was a woman who had worn hers and she was lucky, maybe, that she did. She hadn't been thrown when her car turned over. After I talked with her, I realized she was feeling sick from hanging upside down. So there were problems with the system. Still, she decided not to try to get out of the belt until the emergency crew arrived to give us advice.

9. We were the second generation who didn't know where our food was coming from

We mostly didn’t grow up with local butcher shops, vegetable gardens, bakers, fish vendors, fruit stalls, or local specialty stores. They were all fading, economically. Instead, supermarkets popped up to replace them. The supermarkets effectively moved all the little vendors inside and gave them a big, protected place to partially exist.

Thanks to newish methods of freezing and canning, we didn’t have to worry so much about what was in season, either. Instead of meat or vegetables produced locally, we got perishable items from farther away. True, the food we ate got worse and worse. But it happened slowly. We hardly noticed. When we did, not enough of us cared. Perhaps in a few cases, we did care enough (for instance, I heard twenty-five years of complaints about tomatoes), but we discovered we had no power to change the system. Too many people were too willing to buy apples or tomatoes that looked good, even though they tasted terrible. And so our system produced more and more items that looked good but nutritionally and gastronomically were just colored cardboard.

10. Slowly, our rivers stopped catching fire

When I roamed the forests as a seven year old, I came across old tires, broken barrels, washing machines, smashed beer bottles, and abandoned cars. Sometimes I played in the abandoned cars. I found plenty of big trash in Piney Branch Creek. By the time I was eleven, grown-ups had cleaned up the creek. They made the open containers of chemicals disappear. They reduced the open sewage, too.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 regulated industrial pollution and water processing. People took it seriously. It was the law. Besides, we wanted to breathe. We scrubbed industrial smokestacks to clear the air. Governments stopped dumping radioactive waste into oceans and bays. Our cities sent men to gather up the old appliances left in our parks. They even hauled away some of the abandoned cars. We lived our childhoods during this turning point.

Not Even Not Zen 422: Biomythography - Note 133: Superstitions, Part I

Superstitions, Part I

When I was young, adults took their superstitions seriously - even when they said they didn't. Grown men froze when they saw a black cat. They told me they wouldn't cross paths with one even if it meant taking the long way around to where they were going. I don't think anyone does this nowadays but, as a child, I saw it done.

Sometimes my friends' mother would insist I throw a pinch of salt over my left shoulder when I spilled at the table. My friends, when we were looking up at the stars at night, wished upon falling stars with hope for their wishes being granted. We wished again when blowing out our birthday candles.

Men and women looked for omens in the gathering of birds. Adults feared crows so much they would walk away from a gathering of them. Others would exclaim, "Good luck" as they were hiking by my yard, stoop low, and snatch a four-leaf clover from the ground. Even when adults told me they didn't have any fears of magic, they entertained themselves with astrology, Ouija boards, or tarot (although tarot was somewhat openly feared). They expected bad luck when someone broke a mirror. They avoided cracks in the sidewalk for fear of "break your momma's back." They pulled out a keychain and showed everyone the lucky rabbit's foot they had attached.

People still do these things. The difference in how many people and how often has been tremendous. I've only realized it in retrospect, though. 

I used to visit the graveyard next to the house of my parents' friends. It was small and green. The trees around the headstones created a sheltered space to talk and play. I sang there. I whistled. But if an adult heard me making any sort of music, they would tell me to stop, citing the 'bad spirits' I might attract. (It wasn't even a comment on the quality my singing, apparently.)

"Don't open those umbrellas inside!" my grandmother would call from the kitchen to the foyer on a rainy day. "It's bad luck!"

If I started to open mine anyway, an uncle would leap in to intervene and repeat, "Bad luck! Bad luck!"

So I guess we all believed in luck. It was part of the age we lived in, although people's beliefs in the randomness of good fortune weren't consistent. My father scoffed at the idea that umbrellas could influence anything one way or another. He generally disdained superstitions not his own. However, whenever anything bad happened in the family he would mutter, "It comes in threes," meaning our misfortunes. Then he would stew over the problem until he thought of two other recent unlucky events. If he couldn't think of three in total, he would worry for a week or two until something bad happened, which he regarded as a relief.

This is a part of American social life no one talks about, which is the only reason it's worth mentioning. Superstitions were stronger going farther back in time. There were probably more of them, too. I remember a German friend of my parents who saw omens in fallen objects and the shapes they made when they fell. It was a superstition she grew up with. Plenty of people told me about lucky pennies - you have to find them head's up. If you pick up a penny when it's laying head's down, that's bad luck. It's why I decided as a teenager, still somewhat convinced of my bad luck, to pick up all the bad luck pennies I could. That way, no one else had to incur my sorts of misfortunes.

Three years running, my middle brother and I pulled apart the Thanksgiving turkey wishbone and made a wish. Eventually, the honor fell to my middle and youngest brother. (I think my middle brother won pretty much every time. He wasn't lucky so much as strong and smart enough to pick the best side. Luck, after all, favors the strong and the cunning - and the people who don't refuse their luck.)

For a few years, my father told me I had bad luck. (I had broken at least two mirrors although my father politely said he didn't know the reason for my misfortunes.) I possibly started my father's belief in my bad luck by complaining about it. In gumball machines, I would put in my penny and get, too often, no gumball. Then my younger brother would put his in, turn the crank, and get two or three. This sort of thing happened often enough for me to dread it, for my brother to laugh about it, and for my father to halfway believe in our luck situation. My brother and I would switch places in line suddenly, to try to fool the luck. We hardly ever did, it seemed. One time I put in a whole dime to get a Baby Ruth candy bar from a vending machine. Nothing came out. My brother put in his dime and got two candy bars.

For my father, who was watching us, this was a confirmation. He'd seen the bad luck in action too often. On that day, he offered to buy me another candy bar. (He didn't want to take the second candy bar from my brother.)

"I'll put in the dime and pull the lever," he said. "But you don't touch it."

I knew what he meant. My touch might transmit bad luck. Fortunately, luck didn't seem to be something I could give to others like a bad cold. It was mine alone.
 

Not Even Not Zen 421: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part IV

The Earring, Part IV

After Thanksgiving, college students had a couple days left on break. During my remaining time, I drove to the mall in our hometown. It was an act of boredom but also one of hope. I was searching for gift inspirations. I knew I had to do Christmas shopping before I returned to college. Of course, the mall was putting up their decorations. I saw a pair of workmen half-heartedly assembling a Santa's Workshop display, where lines of children would gather. I wandered through hundreds of glass-fronted shops on multiple floors. I rode elevators. I shuffled through music stores and the bookstores. And I made myself march through the department stores, the anchors at each end, for an hour. A few times, I took notes about my gift ideas for family and friends.

When I'd had enough, I headed to the eastern doors of the mall. As I passed the last hallway of displays, someone I knew from high school dashed over. She was a girl I sort of recognized although she had never talked with me much. Now, she didn't seem flirty or friendly. She wore the kind of urgent expression usually reserved for warning people about natural gas leaks near the house.

"A gang of teenagers has been following you," she said. She held a tiny, white purse in front of her. I could envision her holding schoolbooks in the same, protective way. I tried to remember more about her. "They want to fight you about your earring."

The comment made me laugh. Except for the occasional annoyance of pouring alcohol on my ear, I'd forgotten about my piercing. My father tried occasional comments but I filtered those out before they registered. My brothers had come down on the side of it being cool but, to them, I was just me. They didn't think much about fashion and they wanted to play card games or board games. So no one cared. Until now, and until these teenagers.

I asked her for her name and she nodded, looking slightly offended. Still, she wasn't totally surprised I'd forgotten. After we chatted for a moment, I remembered the teen gang.

"Who is it?" I asked. I turned and headed back where I'd come from, looking for them.

"I don't know their names." Her voice rose in alarm. "Why are you going back?"

"I want to see who it is." I knew I probably wouldn't know them but it would be interesting if I did. Next to me, I could her my friend's feet do a little dance.

"They want to fight," she reminded me.

The idea made me smile. After all, this wasn't about me throwing rocks at their car. I hadn't insulted their moms. It was about something so small I had literally forgotten it. And I was bored. I'd heard three or four threats this week with nothing coming from them. A fight would be something to do. As I approached the corner in the mall corridor, a set of five teenagers vacated it, headed the other way. They walked into the Hecht's department store. I didn't get a good look at them but they seemed to have the bodies of junior high school students. One of them was a girl, maybe, or had a blonde mullet and skinny arms.

Next to me, my friend gestured in their direction. Now I wondered, just for a moment, if she were putting me on.

"Are you sure they want to fight?" I asked as we slowed down. Beside me, my friend barked a nervous, slightly bitter laugh.

"Well," she said sheepishly. "Maybe not really."

So there was a theoretical gang of nearly-teens who might have wanted to fight about my earring but maybe not. Maybe they just wanted to talk tough. Maybe my high school acquaintance simply liked drama, too. Some folks like to play up every confrontation. Between my relatives and the fight threats, though, I decided I was going to keep the earring.

The gold stud had been nothing but an annoyance. It needed cleaning. It needed attention. It was like having a very tiny, very boring pet attached to my head. The moment someone — or possibly no one — wanted to fight me about it, though, I felt fine to go all in over it.

A day later, I headed back to campus and, in the morning after my arrival, I met a couple young women I knew. We lined up at the outside doors of the dining commons.

One was short and blonde, the other taller and brown-haired. I'd had a crush on the brown-haired one during the previous semester. She gave me a hug. The shorter one patted my arm. Both of them stood back for a moment as they studied me.

"Is that new?" asked the shorter one.

"Yeah."

We walked through the doors and into the warmth. My better friend seemed thoughtful.

"You look good," she said a moment later. The line of people ahead of us paused. She turned and gestured that she wanted to look again. I moved my head for her. She caressed my earlobe. "How do you like it?"

"I'm thinking of getting a gold hoop." Friends had brought it up. It wasn't really my idea. Now it seemed right, though.

"Like a pirate!" the other woman exclaimed. "Yeah, even better."

"Mmm." The fingers returned. My old crush touched my ear and neck. "Christmas is coming up. On you, the gold looks good. Maybe I'll buy you a hoop."

I remember realizing, oh yeah, I've made the right choice.