Children of the Futures

I watched The Wonder Years. I liked That 70s Show. And now I watch The Kids are Alright. They remind me of my youth, of really the last generation to grow up without being able to communicate something in ways other than verbally. We did not have bike helmets or seat-belts or laws that dictated we wear one. I remember making our own games that weren't fixed on a video screen and conned you back to the store to buy the next level. I remember games that lasted until parents called you in for the night. They did not leave you addicted and a slave to a screen. We grew up riding our bikes, riding unbelted in the back deck of a station wagon, conquering things like fears. We were learning and discovering things that no video game has ever replicated.

The 70s kids weren't the rebels their predecessors had been, that they had to be. There was some hippie, counter-culture drippings, but I get the sense that 70s kids were not a shock and did not reject the status quo like kids of the early 60s did. By the time we grew up, the offspring of Boomers or—in my case—the preceding generation, the world was changed. In 1968, when many Gen Xers were toddling about, the country was bursting with violence and set on a course of change that would last at least until bumpers read that disco was dead and the doors of Studio 54 closed for good. Parents did not fight it, freak out when their child wanted to grow their hair or become vegan. Change was acceptable all through my generation, and some parents—more than others—even encouraged it. By 1965 it was pretty well known, at least in liberal households—that Vietnam was an unmitigated disaster, a moral detour. Unlike parents of the Boomers, who may have seen serving your country as noble under any circumstances, kids in the late 60s-early 70s were left to make their own decision. Many parents, even if not openly, hoped that there sons would not be drafted, have their lottery number called, or even pass the physical.

Generation X (1965-1981) succeeded the Baby Boomers (1943-1964). The millenniels (1983-2001) succeeded Gen X. It stands out to me, to be glossed over by history, that the Boomers first implanted a counter-culture in society. They changed politics, they won civil rights for blacks, for women, for 18-year-old people to vote. In more recent history, it was the millenniels who got out the vote, who backed Bernie Sanders by the thousands in the 2016 primaries. My generation, X, is not known for civil action, for working within or without the system to change it democratically. Certainly a large part of the generation laps over, touching either end. But, as a whole it is never noted in the scripts that report the way change has unfolded in America. Perhaps this is a reason I've heard us called the “slackers.” The millenniels gathered up the slack—that we left—with their technologically advanced culture, with the technology we lacked, rejected, or still choose to reject. The time frame of births from the mid 60s to the earl 80s was known in much less explicit terms as the “latchkey Generation.” There wasn't the zealous parental monitoring that was dolled out to millenniels like pez. Mothers were going back to work as the second wave of feminism was taking root. I remember my sister and I literally wearing keys around our necks in junior high school. In kindergarten, in 1970, when I came home I was instructed to go over to the neighbor's to wait the few times my mom's and my day didn't sync up.

Biology and religion

The average family in the 1960s had 3.7 kids, marginally bigger than the 3.14 in 2017. One of the innovations to come out of that decade was the birth control pill. Women could have a career ad a family. The pill gave them a choice in the situation of being denied or terminated from a job because of being pregnant. The Kids Are Alright portrays a strict Irish-catholic family in the 70s, having begun their family in the 50s. Over the course of two decades they had a total of eight kids. Obviously that matriarch dose not and can not, bound by religion, use the pill. Expained in the pilot episode is that the oldest son “came home from college.” One can deduce from this that he avoided the draft with a college deferment. In liberal circles, the longevity of the war, the uncertainty of a future, was alone a motivator to work to end the war. Mothers did not want their sons to have to deal with that, coming of age and having an imminent notification to serve in an immoral war predicating their futures. The father on the show often talks of his service in WWII as though it was a rite of passage. The Catholics are a dedicated bunch and, with the powers of Christ in their corner, almost robotically, without logic, go wherever their government asks them. All wars had conscientious objectors, resisters, and those who just plainly chose the latter of the Darwinian concept of fight or flight. None so much, though, as Vietnam. From 1960 to 1975 roughly 170,000 men received CO status from service in Southeast Asia. The decisions the Xers had to make are often brought to the table, portrayed in television. On a episode of All in the Family, also set in the 70s (made in the 70s), Mike brings home a draft dodger who moved to Canada. The ultra-conservative, Christian Archie can not comprehend this level of disrespect, of questioning of the government. He and his friend served in WWII. Archie's friend, however, lost a son in Vietnam. He could live with Mike's friend's decision. I think the gap that fought “policed” in Korea made questioners out of the next generation. War, the eternal aggression and need to show off our military might in the world, was vested. The game was over and then the papers were released. In '71 a generation read how its predecessors had been lied to since 1945.

Catholics, strict ones, must have only believed in procreational sex in the 70s. Consider the mother on The Kids are Alright. With as many crosses and crucifixes on walls as some Jews have Mezuzot on door posts, any bedroom will have the fear of God judging your every move. She procreated at least eight times before her biological clock detonated. So am I to believe that the Catholics of the old school just prayed the woman was fertile when the did the deed, got pregnant, abstained for 9 month, and started the process again? A process hat continued until God shut down the oven for good, “divine sterility.” Do the math. Figure a woman in the 1950s gets married, a virgin, at 17 to 18 years old. Her first night puts a bun in the oven, breaking the seal. The irony here is that 50 to 60 years later a liberated woman may take a while to break the seal on an actual oven. Figure the biological clock is ticking and those Catholics, God love 'em, are making all the hay they can. Let's say until age 41. That's 23 years of procreational sex back in the day. No surgeries, no prophylactics. Its all about the unborn child, the next generation. And that is how you get .5 of a kid.