10 Feral Childhood Memories All Latchkey Gen-X Kids Will Remember
Remember rotting our brains with violent video games? Gen-X kids will.
Valeria Ushakova | Canva Fox News had a story this week that seemingly begged Gen-Xers to stop the rampant “cancel culture” that is “plaguing” our country. That sound you hear is an entire generation sighing in unison. Leave us out of it.
Cancel culture, you say? Ask any Gen-Xer about this term, and they could write you a dissertation on the canceled culture of their youth.
Here are the feral childhood memories all latchkey Gen-X kids will remember:
1. Watching Dee Snyder and his flowing locks take on Tipper Gore and her Washington Wives when they tried to cancel our music
They still got the “Explicit Lyrics” label, and that made it all the more tantalizing.
2. Seeing outraged mobs burn NWA albums in the streets while the artists laughed all the way to the bank
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How about the Satanic Panic? Kids couldn’t even play Dungeons and Dragons without outrage, fear, and distress from their parents.
3. Having the DARE program tell us exactly who the 'bad' people were
There was no nuance there. We lived through the AIDS crisis where we heard over and over again that homosexuality was a sin, and this was the punishment.
4. Letting MTV make us into a generation of foul-mouthed slackers
Madonna and Prince were the targets of moral outrage long before Cardi B or Meg Thee Stallion.
5. Rotting our brains with violent video games
We couldn’t even wear t-shirts with Bart Simpson on them to school because he was such a terrible influence on us.
6. Recalling the moral panic of the 80s and 90s
The “greed is good” mentality of the 80s that bled into the 90s had a real effect on our upbringing.
7. Cooking our own meals long before we knew what puberty was
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As we worry about our kids and their schoolwork during a pandemic, we have vivid memories of being alone at home and getting our homework done.
No one checked it. No one asked if it was done. We looked to the stands during sports matches, plays, and awards ceremonies; we were hopeful for them to be there but never expectant.
8. Witnessing violence in school and out of it, but realizing it wasn’t labeled that way
It was just something “kids did.” We were told not to “ask for it” with our clothes; the dress code at school was several pages long.
9. Being taught 'boys will be boys'
Gen-X women had very little agency over their bodies. “What did you do to provoke that?” is a question X-er women are quite familiar with. Our sex ed was inadequate at best and dangerous at worst.
10. Tuning into MTV when Kurt Cobain died by suicide
We watched live in our classrooms as an exciting mission to space ended in tragedy, and then we watched live in our living rooms as planes flew into towers 15 years later. There is an unspoken trauma that is often left unaddressed.
So, leave us out of your “cancel culture” mess. We grew up with it, and we’re on to the game. It is a distraction. A shiny object that lures us away from the real issues of mounting debt, environmental crises, and inequality.
So, have fun feeding the outrage machine, but don’t ask us to participate. We never were all that great at participation anyway.
Jennifer Graham is a sociology professor and writer in New England. Her essays on Medium and Substack explore real-world topics with a sociological lens to try to lend understanding to the human condition.