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.
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