Generation X would just like to let everyone else know that we’ve got this pandemic covered. Gen X is 70 million plus strong and has been preparing for this moment for forty years, give or take a few, so just sit back take a chill pill and let us take the lead.
Gen X has handled adversity before. Just look at the 80s. We went to bed as our parents read us “The Giving Tree” which was pretty much the worst children’s book ever written. The height of fashion consisted of a pair of Guess jeans that were so tight they cut off circulation to your mid-section and a sweater with shoulder pads large enough to land a helicopter on. The music was generally pretty awful as well but Gen X came out all right. We survived Kajagoogoo and Bananarama and countless other musical abortions. We survived those awful Star Wars prequels that were clearly a soulless money grab and would have shaken us to our core if we weren’t already so jaded. Gen X made it through HIV back when it was called GRID and we’ll make it through COVID-19.
Worried about keeping up a varied and healthy diet during self isolation? Gen X? Not so much. We’ve been preparing for this moment for most of our lives having grown up on Pop-tarts, pizza pockets and Twinkies and just about anything else with a shelf life of around thirty years. Can’t go to the store more than once a week? Gen-X chuckles at the thought. Let’s try for an entire month. Sure we might weigh a good forty pounds heavier than when we started this mess but at least we won’t have accidently infected our parents with COVID-19 because we needed to run out for some organic carrots.
Bored? Generation X patented boredom. Entertainment was pretty much a big yawn for Generation X. Sure we had television but it consisted of about four channels that came in clearly not counting the two or three that were so static filled you had to squint for 15 minutes to find out you were watching a Masters Match from 1963. Some fortunate few had a cable hook up but that really only amounted to another twenty or so channels and most of those were shopping networks or infomercials for Nair. To make matters worse most of us didn’t have a remote so we pretty much just watched whatever was on until the show became so awful that we had to go through the ordeal of getting off the couch to walk all of twelve feet to change the channel.
Generation X also read these things called “books” to keep us amused and many of them, like the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 1984 or countless others, amused us to no end. Sometimes we even read them twice. Other pieces of literature like “A Separate Peace” weren’t all that great but we still read them because we were bored; remarkably, epically and gloriously bored. Our boredom was so profound we did strange things with it like pouring hours of time into making mix tapes titled “Cautiously Platonic” and “Wicked Jams” or writing underground newspapers. Of course we weren’t always that creative. Sometimes we just went outside and threw lawn jarts at each other until someone had to go to the hospital which, at the very least, gave us something else to do and somewhere else to go.
Concerned about the lack of privacy that comes from living in close quarters for lengthy amount of time during self-isolation? Yeah Generation X is too however we’ve suffered through worse. Many of us shared rooms with siblings so the term “privacy” was more of a theoretical notion than anything else. Privacy was also a largely theoretical concept when it came to phone conversations. Instead of mobile phones we were tethered to a wall unit with a long curly thing called a “cord”. Unless we were lucky enough to have a phone in our room every conversation, no matter how sensitive, took place in the open and was ripe for commentary even in the most sensitive of moments. . Wooing your girlfriend with bad poetry is a lot more challenging when you’ve got an older brother punching you in the shoulder and shouting the words “pussy” and “loser” while he’s pretending to sob.
So settle down Boomers and Millennials, Gen Y and Xennials and whoever those idiots were hanging out on the beaches in Florida a few weeks ago. Just follow Generation X’s lead. We promise you’ll be out playing shuffle board or growing out those ridiculous beards in no time and, when it’s all over and you’ve been good, we might just show you how to do a whippet.