By Stephen Smoot
As the generation of Americans born between the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush can relate, interest in people of this age group has picked up in recent years.
Online, many have fun remembering the extraordinary freedom allotted to children. For the first time, it was customary to see both parents working outside of the home. Children came home from school, fixed their own and their sibling’s meals, mowed the grass, and did family laundry to help out.
Playtime meant roaming the neighborhood until “the street lights came on.” Homework did not exist for children until about the fifth grade.
Children today will not believe that until 1991, West Virginia high school students were allowed to have firearms in their vehicles during hunting season as long as they were unloaded.
This was enforced solely by the honor system.
In high school, junior high school, and even in later elementary school grades, if a teacher needed something cut and had nothing handy, he or she would crowdsource the classroom. Usually several boys, and sometimes some girls, had their pocketknives with them.
No kids at school in West Virginia were ever hurt in those days by the presence of guns or knives
None of this, however, is the most mind blowing fact about Generation X.
The most incredible fact is one almost forgotten. Generation X spent their entire childhood under the constant Sword of Damocles represented by the fact that on one side of the world one person could push a button or give an order.
Within an hour of that, the entire civilized world would be vaporized.
“Baby boomers,” as they were styled, lived under a nuclear threat of a different kind. Jimmy Stewart starred in the 1955 movie “Strategic Air Command” that spelled out the mission of the intercontinental bomber fleet. B-52 Stratofortresses, which are expected to remain in service after the century mark of their first deployment, were designed to penetrate Soviet air space and drop their payloads on strategic points.
The Soviet Union, Red China, and Great Britain also developed strategic bombing capabilities. If a world crisis went the wrong way, thousands of bombers would take to the skies on a grim mission to annihilate the enemy’s capability to respond, or even survive.
Despite the fact that the great Italian military mind Giulio Douhet famously and correctly stated in the 1920s that “the bomber will always get through,” one could convince oneself that their side’s fighter and anti-aircraft defense was superior, that the bombers could be shot down and the nation spared much of the potential destruction of atomic war.
Meanwhile, the bombs got bigger and more destructive. The United States tested the hydrogen bomb “Castle Bravo” in 1954. Hydrogen bombs operated differently than the original atomic weapons used on Japan. They used fission as the destructive catalyst, splitting atoms to release powerful energy.
Hydrogen bombs used fusion, forcing atoms of hydrogen to combine into helium, the same process that fuels the Sun itself. Castle Bravo had a 15 megaton yield, about 1,000 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
Five years later, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the testing of “Czar Bomba,” a 50 megaton device. His scientists scolded him, saying that the weapon was so destructive as to be pointless in terms of military practicality. The Soviet leader, however, remained perpetually obsessed with building bigger (if not usually better) than the United States.
A website today can reveal the relative destruction of the various atomic and fusion weapons for any city on earth.
Until the Baby Boomers grew up in the 1960s, bombers remained the primary delivery system. Then came the Space Age.
National Socialist Germany invented both the cruise missile and the ballistic missile and the US and Soviet Union used their scientists to build Cold War capabilities. The ballistic missile V2 design was quickly adapted to spaceflight and served as the great-grandaddy of every rocketship built since.
Of course those rockets could deliver astronauts to space or bombs to Earth very, very quickly. No defense existed for a long time capable of shielding against an attack. Both sides constructed arsenals of thousands of weapons.
And between the 1970s and the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the world lived every second under the existential threat that anger, or even a tragic mistake (such as was fictionally narrated by the late ‘80s West German popular music hit 99 Luftballons), could end the world in between 45 and 90 minutes.
The only warning the average American would receive in such a scenario was the civil defense siren and monotone broadcast of the Emergency Broadcast System.
I promise you that every time every person in Generation X heard the first seconds of a Klaxon signal or the insistent and attention getting Emergency Broadcast System, the first thought in that child’s head was “are we all going to die today?”
It passed once the brain kicked in and realized that war was very unlikely and that it was yet another test or a signal that a fire or a disaster of less than global consequence was occurring.
No one, however, has ever asked a vital question. What does growing up under such circumstances do to the psyche?
Overall, Generation X is characterized as more laid back, less emotionally attached to “causes,” and more interested in a calm and secure life. When in college, Generation X took pride in not starting campus disturbances or protests, choosing to sample from the bounty enjoyed simply by living in America.
That generation also revered as heroes those of their grandparents’ age. They grew up on stories of privation during the Great Depression and the violence of global war.
Generation X grew up learning how good they had it, and with constant admonitions to appreciate it from grandparents who had far less. They also knew that it could all, up to and including humanity itself, disappear at any time through the caprice of international conflict.
Never in history before or since has a generation of people lived under such strange and potentially stress-inducing conditions.
Lessons learned include paying little mind to what cannot be changed, appreciate each day as a gift from God because tomorrow quite literally might not come, and to appreciate what you have more than worrying about what you lack.
This made that generation much less ambitious in some ways in terms of economic advancement or social causes, but conferred on it a peace of mind that put the daily issues and irritations of life into the all encompassing category of “Excrement Happens.”
Based on observations, the environment instilled in Generation X a social resiliency based on perspective. We also gained a hero in President Ronald Reagan. He promised to end the Cold War and remove from the world all nuclear weapons.
Generation X concluded that one out of two wasn’t bad and he, along with Saint John Paul II the Great, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain remain the titanic figures of that time, representing the best that those times offered in leadership.
Those with the expertise and the ability to stay objective should study the time and the people and figure out what lessons can be learned from it to help restore the resiliency that society has lost ever since.
Because there is a persistent and problematic point to this.
Generations after those times struggle to deal with the stresses of daily life while Generation X struggled with the daily threat to life itself.
That is the difference, but what does it mean?