The historic election of Donald J. Trump to his second term rests at the feet of a generation of unsung heroes. Data shows that if you want to thank someone today for pulling America back from the brink of more Democrat malfeasance, you should thank a GenXer.
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This is fascinating. Any hot takes on why Gen X decided the election? https://t.co/ONhg2HR8ft pic.twitter.com/eVw20W84Az
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) November 6, 2024
I am a proud GenXer. I grew up running wild until the street lights came on, unsupervised, unchained, independent, and free. When I was seven years old, I would go get my four-year-old neighbor, and we would walk two blocks up and across a busy street to the White Hen to buy candy before heading to the park, where we played all day with no adults anywhere in sight. At a young age, I was left home alone and came home to an empty house when my parents were working. I learned to cook for myself, entertained myself, and never, EVER admitted I was bored, lest my mother assign chores. I was given specific lies to tell people who called asking for my parents when they weren’t home. “She’s in the shower. Can I take a message?” I had my TV lineup for after school, which included “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island.”
My generation is unnervingly quiet. No one talks about us. We don’t make the headlines very often, and we generally like it that way. Left alone for so much of our childhoods, we enjoy being left alone. We own “alone.”
One of the reasons no one notices us is that Millennials take up all the air in the room. For one, they dwarf us in size; secondly, they’re often very loud and whiny. When Millennials entered the workplace, they caused no end of annoyance for everyone around them, demanding special treatment, coffee bars, mental health days, pronouns, and other things GenXers thought were lame. They job-hopped and created article after article about “How to Keep Millenials Happy” while we put our heads down and made our careers, often in the same company for our entire work lives.
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GenX is the last generation raised without smart technology. We were wild and untethered to the approval of strangers on the internet. GenX doesn’t care what you think about us. We learned that skill on the playgrounds of the ’70s and ’80s. If you weren’t there, you can’t appreciate how dangerous that actually was. When we weren’t dodging rusted metal edges of slides, we were suffering the verbal assaults of the schoolyard bullies that often escalated to physical fights. The adults in charge did not care to intervene. We were regularly told, “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.”
Movies made for kids back then were full of expletives and violence. We might not have used that language in front of adults, but around the neighborhood, there wasn’t a kid who didn’t know every four-letter word out there. Some of us memorized the raunchiest parts of Eddie Murphy’s “RAW,” and I bet there are a few of you reading this right now who can rattle off George Carlin’s 7 dirty words. Words are just words. And we believe in defending all those words, whether we use them or not.
We revere free speech, and Generation X has become a fierce defender of all the words we’re not supposed to say. We don’t believe in the power of words to harm anyone. We don’t think participation trophies are worth anything, either. Winning and losing were very clearly defined on those playgrounds. There were winners and losers, nerds and popular kids, and it was up to us to battle it out and survive.
Teachers in the eighties were too busy drilling us about the evils of communism to get involved in schoolyard nonsense. And speaking of communism, it was a real, everyday threat. Nuclear annihilation and the mutually assured destruction of the whole world were a daily reality. We did drills regularly, not for school shooters but for Russian nukes, as if hiding under our desks would have protected us from nuclear fallout. We knew these drills wouldn’t protect us because, as Mr. Fox says, our bullsh*t meter is set to high. But it did give us the sense at an early stage of life that we were in survival mode and on borrowed time. We understood mortality, impermanence, and fear at a young age. It made us skeptical, jaded, pessimistic, and a little dark. We can take a lot.
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Gen 𝕏 pic.twitter.com/E6zFvrqgQN
— Yo, Mel!!! 🪻 (@YoMelToo) November 6, 2024
We watched movies like “Red Dawn” and planned with our friends which treehouses we would escape to if the commies ever invaded. And frankly, if that had happened, you would have seen an awful lot of ten- to sixteen-year-olds willingly join the fray. We were wild and rebellious. We rode around with no seatbelts, in the backs of pickup trucks, and drank from garden hoses when we were thirsty. We don’t like being told what to do. And if you try it, you’ll get a response like this.
So why did I vote for Trump? It’s very simple. I’m in the stage of my life where I have one child in college, and my other two will be following, which will see my family paying for college for the next twelve years without a break.
Mr. Fox and I have aging parents who need extra attention and care. This means expensive flights, travel expenses, care expenses, and more. And when the government decides to let inflation get so wildly out of control that our higher-than-average salaries are strained by buying a week’s worth of groceries, and we have a month where we’ve accidentally overdrawn our account for the first time in a decade, and we watched the American government turn into Soviet-style thugs who physically harmed our children by unnecessarily locking them down, destroying two years of their lives, forcing them to wear masks, forcing people to get vaccines they didn’t want, and then the state of New York broke down someone’s door and executed their pet squirrel and raccoon… brother, it’s war.
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We worked too hard to get to a place where we don’t live hand to mouth, and we will not go back to living like 20-year-olds in their first apartment. And we will not allow the government to step on our necks and the necks of our children. No amount of mean tweets will stop us from inflicting as much pain on the people who did this to us as possible. They all hate Trump. THAT makes him the perfect guy for the job. GenX is bearing the brunt of this terrible government and has been for some time. We want revenge.
We are the ones with the mortgages, children, and real responsibilities. We don’t have the luxury to sit around in safe spaces on college campuses whining about gender. We’re the generation that embraced tomboys and boys in eyeliner with long hair and earrings. We invented gender-bending pop culture, but we didn’t pretend it changed biology. For us, it was about freedom and expression, not a way to control others and impose forced speech. We are not bigots. We remember a time in America when television was diverse, without checking quotas, and the most famous family on TV was a black family beloved by everyone. We accepted everyone, and Democrats tried to paint us as racists.
We’re old enough to have seasoned views of reality and young enough to have the energy to wage war if we need to. Be careful with us because we were rudely interrupted from working hard, trying to live our lives, raising our kids, and caring for our parents. We don’t appreciate being choked by people who are supposed to work for us. We’re slow to get involved. Hardly any of us want to be involved in politics because we make fun of politicians. Hell, we make fun of everyone. It’s in our nature. But when we stop laughing, that’s when you need to worry. We will only put up with so much.
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And to be honest, GenX loves mean tweets. Insults bring us right back to those playground roots. We survived it. And the younger generations behind us could benefit from some taunting. Bullying made us stronger. It made us lose our concern for what other people think. And we really don’t care what pink-haired, gender-confused weirdos think about us. They’re lucky we don’t say out loud what we are thinking when we order our lattes from them at Starbucks, or they’d be in therapy for years. What we lived through solidified a sense of self that GenX has deeply rooted within. We know who were are, and names like “Nazi” and “white supremacist” don’t stick because we’re rubber and you’re glue, and anything you say bounces off us and sticks to you. God bless Generation X. We’re the reluctant, annoyed heroes we’ve been waiting for.
And a word of advice: Do not attempt to get into troll wars with GenXers. They say, “The Left can’t meme,” but it’s really because no self-respecting GenXer would help those losers. You will not recover from a battle of jokes with us. We will hurt you. Stephen Hilton here has a bio that says, “Love, light, and f*ck the system.” He’s just one GenXer with a mixing board. Angering us en masse is a stupid thing to do.
I fixed it for you pic.twitter.com/Dmoxdj02DI
— stephen hilton (@stephenhilton23) November 7, 2024
