Not Even Not Zen 425: Biomythography - Note 136: On Generation X, Part III

Generation X, Part III

21. Gambling was illegal

"It's just immoral," was a phrase I heard a lot, growing up, about gambling. Legislatures had made nearly every form of gambling illegal because it was so obviously bad. Casinos, for instance, were designed to take money and give nothing in return. Of course they were against the law. Was your neighbor running a lottery? Well, it had ridiculous odds of hundreds to one, so it was also made illegal. Poker games with buddies? Well, playing for chips was okay but you couldn't play for money. That was the moral stance.

Horse racing? Well, it was legal. The inconsistency made adults frown. The stock market? It was also legalized and also frowned upon. Remember the Great Depression? Betting on stocks was immoral even when it was legal, and its immorality had consequences. After the stock crash of 1973, I heard many people say betting on stocks should be illegal.

The proponents of gambling said the moralists were simply being 'puritan,' that a little gambling fun never hurt anyone, and anyway the stock market was doing well again. New Hampshire started a lottery based on horse racing (to make everyone feel nothing much was changing, I suppose). Other states followed, many of them giving even worse odds and with no ties to horse racing. The state governments didn't offer odds of merely hundreds to one but thousands or millions to one. They promised more money for programs people wanted (like senior living homes and neighborhood schools) and the result was what our friends called 'math taxes' - that is, fees imposed on people who couldn't do math and hence played those lotteries.

22. Underage Drinking Started Getting Enforced

In the generations previous to ours, drinking while underage was normal. During Generation X, police started to enforce the laws more. A social movement against liquor got revitalized by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), which won quick success and received a parody movement in opposition, Drunks Against Mad Mothers (DAMM). But MADD was not kidding. Their members had lost children to something they felt was preventable. They kept at it. They succeeded in, among other things, raising the drinking age.

As a result, some members of Generation X could drink legally at 18, some at 20, and some at 21. Some folks (like me) got grandfathered in by our home state. Some did not. One of my college friends turned legal at 18, then illegal, then legal at 20, then illegal, then legal again at 21. People had to stop framing the issue in terms of morality because the community morals were so inconsistent. Instead, they discussed drunk driving and road safety. Those issues seemed to win the debate.

Enforcement lagged behind the laws, though, I was able to buy beer and wine when I was 15 years old. No one asked me for identification. By the time I was twenty every place asked for ID.

To be fair, lots of people had been driving drunk, many more than I usually see mentioned. There seems to be some revisionism going on. In a discussion nowadays, a person or two may reluctantly concede that folks drove drunk back when Generation X was growing up. If you ask for specifics, though, hardly anyone admits to driving drunk themselves.

23. Women's Liberation Hit During our Formative Years

I'm going to start off with an achievement that never gets mentioned: mental freedom. Women gained the ability to realize they were not broken or psychopathic. People seem too embarrassed to mention it. In retrospect, it seems too unbelievable to discuss, as well.

In 1973, Trident Press published a book called My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday. At the time, the medical profession treated female sexual fantasies as a sickness. Women could be involuntarily committed to treatment if they admitted to having them. After the fantasies were compiled systematically for discussion, though, psychologists started to back off their preconception of them as abnormal.

My Secret Garden gets sneered at even now. But the book was groundbreaking. It contributed to broader 1970s conversations about female sexuality and helped destigmatize women's sexual thoughts and desires. A lot of people apparently don't count that as any kind of freedom. I disagree because I consider it vital to have real freedom of mind.

More conventionally, our generation got the benefit of sex discrimination getting banned in education. We grew up with girls and boys getting equal(ish) opportunities to take classes and play sports. We benefited from the legalization of abortion, too, and increased access to contraception, which gave women control over their bodies. (These also led to a huge reduction in violent crime starting about fifteen years later.) We had the Equal Pay Act. In 1974, we got the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which enabled women to obtain credit cards and loans without a male co-signer. In 1978, we got the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which made it illegal to fire or discriminate against pregnant workers. We got the first battered women's shelters and the first treatment of domestic violence as a systemic issue, not just as a personal one. In short, the United States changed in fundamental ways. Generation X was the first to grow up with the changes.

24. We Were the First Generation Encouraged to Incur Debt

In previous generations, people often didn't carry any debts - because they couldn't.

Loans weren't available to most people except as layaway programs in department stores. Many women couldn't acquire debts at all in their own name. People of color faced similar challenges. Poor white men with the wrong types of job couldn't get loans. On top of everything else that restricted credit, many religions opposed interest charges as usury. When banks eased credit guidance and raised credit card rates, those churches initially tried to shut down MasterCard and Visa. They seem awfully quiet about usury nowadays.

I got my first credit card at J.C. Penny, a store card, when I was fifteen. I had a job, so I was eligible. I got a free plastic cup and pitcher set with my application, too. Two years later, I got my first government-backed loan for college. The terms of my college loans came at a reasonable discount compared to modern loans. When a typical mortgage interest rate was 17%, I paid 8% for college because the government guaranteed it for me. Now, when the mortgage rate is 4%, a student loan is still 8% and that's no longer a good deal.

25. We Had Student Smoking Sections

It's amazing how openly the country surrendered on the subject of child health. Tobacco companies had been fighting for decades to keep people smoking despite the consistent negative results of science research on lung cancer. They had been winning the public battle, too. Of course, we have similar fights going on today over microplastics, pesticides, glyphosates, PFAs, and more. The companies responsible will win for a long time. I don't know if we'll have the equivalent of student smoking sections in public schools on any of those issues, though.

I'm not even certain how official our student smoking sections were. I've never read a book of school rules. What I know is we had outdoor areas the teachers told us were for "only students to smoke." I bought cigarettes so I could go hang out there, where the hardcore smokers, some of them pretty girls, talked endlessly about how terrible a habit it was.

26. We Had Leaded Gasoline

This is a contender for crime of the century, even in a century filled with crime.

In 1921, an engineer for General Motors named Thomas Midgley discovered a compound called “tetraethyl lead” that stopped car engines from shuddering. Midgley led a conglomerate, the Ethyl Corporation, to make leaded gasoline. Cars and generators used his new formula, which caused catastrophic damage to the environment. As one of the effects, our nation saw a widespread cognitive decline. Childhood lead exposure impaired the development of our brains. We got an increase in cardiovascular disease and kidney failures from the lead. Higher exposures gave us elevated rates of psychiatric issues, including depression, anxiety, and neuroticism. In the 1970s, after legal wrangling, we started phasing out leaded gasoline in the United States. In 1996, we banned it outright.

The results of the toxic lead are persistent. It lingers in the atmosphere, so we still breathe it. It's in our dust, soil, and water and it always will be there. We will always be dumber and more neurotic than previous generations. We will always pay higher health care costs due to the lead.

27. We Carried Pocket Knives

At the age of ten, I was, at last, allowed to carry. I had won a Boy Scout pocket knife in a contest. It had a can opener, a blade, a corkscrew (so useful for ten year olds!), an awl, a second blade, and a flathead screwdriver. I carried it everywhere I could for the summer. No marshmallow stick was safe from whittling.

The tool knives were emblematic of a level of trust and responsibility. We absorbed the cultural rules: don't pull it out in a fistfight because it's more honorable to lose the fistfight; no threatening anyone; don't whittle toward your body; don't complain when you whittle toward yourself and get cut; don't unscrew the door jamb just to screw it back in; do unscrew the outlet plate to impress your friend but then, for heaven's sake, put it back.

We had BB guns. We had air pellet guns. We had rolls of gunpowder caps. We had fireworks. We had chemistry sets. Some older teens had hunting guns in their room. A lot of these things went to school. It didn't matter, usually. Because we were trusted.

28. Life Expectancy Was 20 Years Less Than Most of Us Got

“Men live to sixty two,” my science teacher told me in fourth grade. “Women get to sixty-seven. But of course those are only averages.”

“Why do women live longer than men?” I complained.

“I think no one knows.”

In fact the life expectancy calculations kept growing as we aged. Now we have life expectancies of 76 for men and 81 for women. We know more about what those numbers mean, too. We understand the averages are not only a measure of improved cancer treatments (remission for 20 years instead of none) but all other health improvements. We know that testosterone looks implicated in men dying a little earlier. Still, our generation grew up with the expectation that half of us would be dead by now. And it's not as bad as that. Our lingering in this world affects Social Security calculations. It affects decisions about retirement, bucket lists, healthcare, hospice care, and spiritual life in general.

Gen X has more chronic illnesses (like hypertension and diabetes) than the Boomers; we are currently the sandwich generation caring for parents and children both; and we suffer unexpected financial strain from the caring, too.

29. Unions Faded

As we were growing up, American companies moved manufacturing jobs overseas. The move had supply chain consequences affecting the shape of the world economy. The first consequence, though, was a crippling of American unions.

Unions fought for living wages and basic benefits like healthcare. As their negotiating leverage diminished, Generation X saw the loss of small tokens of workplace respect, usually enshrined in better office conditions. Jobs stopped keeping bank schedules. Workers lost paid lunch hours, then lost paid lunch half-hours, and finally lost smoke breaks. In some cases, the Boomer generation of workers kept the benefits while excluding Generation X and other, later hires.

We lost our pensions. In fact, we lost the idea of pensions. Companies moved pension funds into stock-based retirement funds. Corporations went from giving some loyalty and expecting strict loyalty in return to saying aloud, “anyone who believes in loyalty is a sucker.” We increased our productivity many times over but without the rewards seen in previous generations.

30. Healthcare Turned from a Non-Profit Service to a Profit-Making One

One of the worst consequences of this transition was complexity. I know it doesn't get mentioned often but the difficulty of figuring out what your insurance will cover while you're ill or dying is not trivial. Yes, the current system results in huge overhead costs, the largest in the world. It produces weird gaps in insurance coverage. Our system prizes efficiency in service delivery (not billing) over effectiveness. However, what we want most while ill is an effective treatment. But I think complexity is a real killer, sometimes literally.

Lack of transparency is perhaps the next-worst thing. We don't get to read Consumer Reports about the success rates of hospitals, surgeons, specialists, or nursing units. We don't know where the value is for our money and therefore we can't really make cost competition or quality improvements happen.

On the plus side, the American system results in profitable hospitals and good pay for doctors. Those aren't insignificant things. A few countries around the world experience doctor shortages more or less constantly because they don't pay enough to keep them.