I’m not sure if any of you caught the goofy “Hands Off” ragefests that took place this past weekend, but I took a gander to see what the left was fussing about this time. Other than their tiresome “orange man bad” refrain. Sure enough, it was more of the same, with a dash of DOGE and a twist of Musk Derangement Syndrome thrown in for dramatic effect.
What struck me, though, was how very Boomer the crowds looked (see the accompanying photo captured this past weekend by our own Jennifer Oliver O’Connell). It’s as if every retired librarian who identifies as a coastal elite, which seems to be most of them, had dragged their Birkenstock-clad spouses out to the spectacle and shoved a silly sign in their hands. In short, the protestors were very old and very white.
Like many Gen-Xers, and especially those of us who were born right on the heels of the Boomers, I’ve always held a healthy amount of disdain for the group that came before us. As a group, they come off as incredibly self-righteous, smug, and completely un-self-aware, and despite having enjoyed the best years of America, they’re still mad and are now complaining about those of us who have to clean up their messes.
Then, after logging onto X to see the latest “discourse” around the tariffs, I see this:
A good friend of mine who is conservative / right-wing / Republican just sent me this.
You start messing around with people’s investments and 401(k)s and you’re going to lose support — fast. pic.twitter.com/GEBcYxMGcx
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 7, 2025
I don’t even have to know the person involved to know they are a Millennial. This sentiment oozes, “I like my fat 401(k) and cheap consumer goods and I’ll give up all of my freedoms to have them!” Hey, we all like those things, but you’re kidding yourself if you think there’s not a steep price to pay for them. Did “new math” make an entire generation financially illiterate?
While our generational bookends are engaged in their tariff and Trump tantrums, we Gen Xers are over here wondering how so many of our fellow citizens thought the gravy train was going to go on for forever. The signs have sure been there for a long time that we’d eventually pay the price for things like printing money and selling our farmland to China. And here we are.
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Generation X has always known there’d be a day of reckoning for the United States. We’ve been told for decades we’d best save our pennies because there sure as heck wasn’t going to be any Social Security left for us when we hit retirement age. When I was handed my college diploma in the early 90s, it came with a message of: “Congratulations, sure hope you can find a job in this economy. Oh, and you’ll never have it as good as your parents.”
Not a great note on which to start adulthood, but it’s okay to live in reality and not on tired slogans and scaredy-cat doomsday scenarios. My generation has learned some hard lessons along the way, having experienced the Cold War, stagflation, Black Monday 1987, high mortgage rates in the 90s, the tech stock bubble burst of the early 2000s, two terror attacks on the World Trade Center, the war on terrorism, the financial crisis of 2008 and, of course, COVID. We’ve weathered these things, having grown up in an America that valued freedom, was proud of the “Made in America” label, and celebrated patriotism.
For goodness sake, we were forced to listen to the bloviating of Boomers like Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and Billy Joel as they lamented the loss of middle America and our manufacturing base. And now that generation is ticked off that Donald Trump wants to return our country to some of its past glory? Spare me.
Now, it’s too easy to blame all of today’s problems on Boomers, and the truth of it is that it’s been generations of both Republicans and Democrats who have used the American taxpayer as a limitless credit card and doing their best to suck freedom dry. But, the truth is also that Generation X is staring down retirement while wrestling with a Boomer generation that is hanging for dear life onto a lot of our country’s resources and Millennials who don’t seem to have the backbone to deal with an economic downturn that history has proven will be temporary.
The funny thing about all of this is that the object of these two generations’ ire, Donald Trump, may turn out to be the most Gen X president this country ever gets. Our tiny group may never get one of our own into the White House, but Trump, who’s on the older side of the Boomer cohort, seems to have begun the fight we always knew was headed our way.
Gird your loins and saddle up, my fellow Gen Xers. We’ve got a country to save.
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