#xers

nemo sciebat quid haec sugitoria vocata essent sed homines Aetatis X ea omnibus aestatibus edebant

no one knew what these lollipops were called but Gen X-ers ate them every summer

So I was trying to explain Action Park to Caregiver Millennial.  For the record, I still think Action Park may have been the most Xer thing ever.  This Park had zero safety warnings, safety testing, or safety standards.  It maimed and/or killed people every year, and Boomers would take their kids there and set them loose in a water park mostly staffed by untrained teenagers and go off to get drunk in the beer garden knowing how incredibly dangerous it was.

Millennial: Why did they let him keep operating it? Me, an Xer, with a casual shrug: It was New Jersey in the late seventies and eighties.  Nobody much cared if a handful of young people got killed or disabled there.

So I've been thinking about the way I didn't even question it.  Like: bad things happened all the time to us growing up.  People got beaten up or sexually assaulted or hit by cars or lost random body parts or paralyzed or what have you, and the goal from when you were three or so was to not get killed or maimed.  I never saw a bike helmet until I was in my twenties.  I road in lots of cars with no seat belts as a kid, knowing damned well how dangerous that was.  One time a door popped open due to a mechanical fault and a cousin nearly fell out on the high way, but the others grabbed him and hauled him back in.  I had a lover in the '90's whose parents had an old beater car when he was a kid and there was a big hole in the floor through which he and his brother watched the road go by between their legs.  I dated multiple people who had their faces and arms burned by stranger's cigarettes because they weren't paying attention and had dangling cigarettes while they were on crowded sidewalks.  My sister was injured when a drunk driver rammed us and the cop pressured my mom into not pressing charges until she gave up even though the guy had no license and had 45+ other drunk driving convictions and we could smell him from the passenger side while he was talking to her on the driver's side and was wobbly and slurring his words.

This is not a kids these days rant.  This is an observation about a big chunk of my generation growing up with an unspoken assumption that we were expendable.

I'm not saying no one grieved when one of us died.  Families were devastated.  Friends grieved and grieved.  It's more subtle than that.  I'm just saying most Boomers couldn't be arsed to lift their cigarette up when passing a parent holding a kid's hand because it was less effort to burn the cheek of a five year old stranger.

I wonder if some of it was the ass end of the Cold war.  We just kind of assumed we'd never live to see thirty because the world would likely end, something that seemed a lot more likely once Regan became president.  Then the plague hit when I was thirteen and if the Bomb didn't kill you odds are sex would.  You just learned to live with it, the way you learned to dodge the neighborhood pedophiles and the gangs of teenagers wanting to catch and really hurt you.

What adult would care about the safety of someone else's kids when the world was this fucked up?  Why do something about pollution or the environment or police burning down a whole middle class black neighborhood for political reasons?  Why shut down a wildly unsafe water park that disabled or killed some children and teens every year?  Why not shred the social safety net, tilt taxation to reward inherited wealth and punish work, why not let college become a lifelong unpayable debt and blame the next three generations for trying to adapt to a wildly hostile world Boomers decided to create because they got theirs let's pull up the ladder so no one else could follow.

Boomers: the Me Generation  Xers: the Expendable Generation

Look, I fucking hate helicopter parenting, but I love seat belts and bike helmets and slides that don't tear up your legs.  I believe in raising kids to be independent, but there's a happy fucking medium, and the way we were raised was way too far to the Libertarian give no fucks side.  Helicopter parenting is the pendulum swinging way to far the other way and then getting weaponized against single parents, parents in poverty, parents who aren't upper middle class white.

Neither of these things are good.

There are so many things that are fucked up about the way Millennials and Zoomers are still paying for the sins of the fathers and Grandfathers down to the third generation.  The endless fucking trauma of endless war and active shooter drills, the way everything Boomers tried on us they made geometrically worse for y'all.

The way the weight of all the unaddressed problems the Boomers had zero interest in fixing in the '70's and '80's got geometrically heavier and placed on your shoulders because there weren't even close to enough of us to stop them and we were so busy just trying to survive the hostile late stage capitalist dystopia they build for us.

You aren't expendable.  None of us really ever were.

Gen Xers Driving Multi-Generational Housing Trend

This Is Us. Jane the Virgin. Black-ish. What do they have in common? They are all family television programs that have members of multiple generations living under one roof. But the reality of multi-generational living is more than storyline fodder.

According to the 2019 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report by the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), this continues to be a growing…

“At Acer, we believe that it’s time to focus on bridging the generation divide,” shares Sue Ong-Lim, Sales and Marketing Director of Acer Philippines. “It’s imperative that we see that, amidst the differences between Gen Xers and millennials, they are also a lot alike.”

Central to the campaign is the partnership between Acer Philippines and G-Shock, a sub-brand under Casio. G-Shock’s appeal has spanned both the Gen X and millennial generation, and continues to be popular among the youth today.

Acer Philippines also called on rock musician Basti Artadi and spoken word artist Juan Miguel Severo, both artistic icons of their craft and time, to collaborate and develop “Time For Us” a musical-and-spoken word piece to drive the message of the campaign. Basti Artadi, vocalist of the award-winning rock band Wolfgang, rose to fame in the mid- to late-90s, making him a legend among those from Gen X.

Meanwhile, Juan Miguel Severo popularized the art of spoken word poetry when “Ito Na Ang Huling Tula Na Isusulat Ko Para Sa’yo”, his original piece, made rounds on social media, making it viral among the millennials. The piece cemented the admiration of spoken word poetry as an art form, and since then, Juan Miguel Severo has become the face of the craft.

“G-Shock is proud to be Acer’s partner in furthering this cause. With Basti Artadi and Juan Miguel Severo, we aspire to bring the Gen X and millennial generation together,” says Charlene Hung, Marketing Officer of Casio Philippines. “With their help, we are optimistic that we will ultimately be able to succeed.”

The #TimeForUs Launch Event

The #TimeForUs launch led by Acer Philippines was held at Yes Please in June. This modern bar at Bonifacio Global City was transformed into a nostalgic wonderland reminiscent of the 80s and 90s, but peppered with today’s technology, symbolic of the event’s cause – old school arcades paired with Acer’s latest laptops, music sets that shifted from old school beats to modern pop, and an overall aesthetic that brought out the best from both eras.

As Acer Philippines formally announced its partnership with G-Shock, the powerhouse brands launched the #TimeForUs promo, where every purchase of qualifying Acer laptops entitles its buyers to a G-Shock watch, which they may claim in any of Acer’s service centers in Manila, Cebu, and Davao.

The event also saw the debut of “Time For Us” – the musical-and-spoken word piece created by Basti Artadi and Juan Miguel Severo. Basti Artadi pumped up the crowd with his roaring voice as Juan Miguel Severo, representative of the millennials, spewed compelling words; together, they delivered a powerful performance which was symbolic of two generations uniting. The Time For Us music video is now live online – you may watch the compelling piece at the Acer Philippines Facebook Page.

“At the end of the campaign, both G-Shock and Acer Philippines want to have brought a better understanding of and between Gen Xers and millennials,” adds Hung. “We want these two generations to see the merits of working together.”

To learn more about Acer and #TimeForUs, you can visit http://www.acer.com.ph, follow @acerphils on Twitter, or visit the Acer Philippines Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/AcerPH. Interested parties may also see flyers for more details on the G-Shock promo.