It’s Our Time: Gen-Xers and the Election of Barack Obama

As a member of Generation X, my generation has been defined and categorized by others: boomers and millennials in particular. Boomers labeled us lazy and disaffected while doting and hovering over lazy and disaffected millennials who did little else but just show up.

With the onslaught of campaign post-mortem and the gearing up for the 2010 election, boomers and millennials are once again at the center of this analysis, while Generation X, my generation, the generation coming of political age in the Obama administration, continues to get passed right on by.

Xers have the unfortunate luck to be situated directly between two population booms.  We are, by sheer fact of our numbers, incapable of matching the self-aggrandizing of the boomers and their lauding of the millennials.  Our collective voice, no matter how strong, just cant shout loud enough.  Thankfully for this country we realized there was no need to compete.  And once the rest of the world took notice, things began to change.

That's right.  I'm doing something very un-Xer like.  I'm taking credit for the vision of change promised by the Obama administration.  You see, we Xers gave up long ago trying to play by the political rules crafted by the boomers.  I'll admit, we flirted with them briefly during the first Clinton administration, but once we saw that administration as the same old same old boomer crap we checked out.  But if we checked out, how then could the election of Barack Obama possibly be about, let alone driven by, the slacker generation?

For starters, one great benefit of consistently being overlooked by the boomers meant the creation of our own political counter-insurgency in the private sector.  My generation are the business leaders of the green economy.  We created those private sector models designed to tackle the looming environmental (and related geo-political) catastrophes.  Same goes for poverty eradication, education, and finance.  Those industries that have remained in the boomer charge-- I'm looking at you auto, airline, and banking -- have come crashing down under the weight of their own avarice.  We know how to tackle the big issues of the next decade and will lead that change.

My generation has now fought in three wars- Gulf War I, Afghanistan, and our current debacle.  We can throw in Somalia and the Balkans as well, just for good measure.  We know the human toll, the human sacrifice.  We can talk about war other than Vietnam.  As a product of divorce and custody battles we are natural diplomats.  We spent a lifetime negotiating with warring parties.  This perspective, these skills, will get us out of Iraq and usher in a new era of global diplomacy.  Sound crazy?  Just watch.

Being on the front end of the technology boom, teenagers and college students at the advent of email and the World Wide Web, means we are rooted in the actual world as we branch out to the virtual.  Unlike our little brothers and sisters the millennials, we remember a time when life was not digital.  That realism will serve us as we advance the goals of equality in this digital age and assist developing nations.  We will keep the human in humanitarian.

We are a post-identity politics generation and have laid the foundation for the awakening of a new age of liberalism.  But this is not your father's liberalism.  No.  Living through recessions, war, divorce, and raised in the shadows of Vietnam and Watergate made us inherently skeptical of bold institutional promises of anything, let alone substantive change.  We know that government cannot do it alone so we will not expect nor demand it to.  

Our heroes and peers in the chattering class have set the tone for the critical, engaged, but ultimately still hopeful political rhetoric of this new age.  Through the lens of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Rachel Maddow we will keep our institutions honest.

And by now we are used to the millennials getting all the attention and taking all the credit.  That's fine.  Go on boomers-- keep applauding your legacy and praising the millennials simply for showing up.  This is our time and we've got work to do.