I was 21 when the last recession in America started. Douglas Copeland's book came out and named my generation: Generation X. Soon after that, as the nation went into recession and then began to struggle out of it, a bunch of books emerged about Generation X. For the most part, the books had a negative tone. Generation X, they said, were slackers, they had no work ethic. Generation X was hedonistic. Generation X was undirected, apolitical, utterly without goals. At the same time the press was full of articles regarding the strength of the Japanese economic system and the depth of America's industrial decline. This tone lasted several years, as did the recession. Although on narrow technical grounds the recession ended in the summer of 1991, the feeling on the streets was one of recession at least till 1994. There was a sense, occasionally made explicit in some op-ed piece, that these two phenonema were connected: Generation X had no work ethic and that was why America couldn't compete with Japan.
I thought it was unfair that my generation was being blamed for America's industrial decline. We had been too young to have any influence on any of the important decisions. We had not chosen to run up 2 trillion in Federal debt, we had not decided to build an economy that sucked too much oil, we had not chosen to let the Savings and Loans industry speculate in real estate. It was reactionary to blame the young for the nation's problems, though I understood some of the psychology involved after I read Barbara Ehrenreich's book Fear of Falling. Then it was clear: the worst fear of middle class parents is that they or their children will end up poorer than they themselves are now.
In contrast, as we flirt with this next recession, boomer bashing seems mildly progressive. At least the blame, if there is to be blame, is being put in the right place: boomers were the generation in charge during the 199 0s, they had the Presidency and they had control of most of the financial leavers. If someone screwed up, it was them.
--Lawrence Krubner