Children of the 80's

Nov 5 03:11 UTC 1995

I'm sure that few people have seen this, but I thought that this
might be sort of appriate.


I know that a couple of you have seen this...but it still holds true.



                         Don't call me "Generation X,"
                        call me a child of the eighties

                               by Bryant Adkins
                          published in The Reflector
                               January 20, 1995


------------------------------------------------------------------------

 I am a child of the eighties. That is what I prefer to be called. The
nineties can do without me. Grunge isn't here to stay, fashion is
fickle and "Generation X" is a myth created by some over-40 writer
trying to figure out why people wear flannel in the summer. When I got
home from school, I played with my Atari 2600. I spent hours playing
Pitfall or Combat or Breakout or Dodge'em Cars or Frogger. I never did
beat Asteroids. Then I watched "Scooby Doo." Daphne was a Goddess, and I
thought Shaggy was smoking something synthetic in the back of their
psychedelic van. I hated Scrappy.

 I would sleep over at friends' houses on the weekends. We played army
with G.I. Joe figures, and I set up galactic wars between Autobots and
Decepticons. We stayed up half the night throwing marshmallows and
Velveeta at one another. We never beat the Rubik's Cube.

 I got up on Saturday mornings at 6 a.m. to watch bad Hanna-Barbera
cartoons like "The Snorks," "Jabberjaw," "Captain Caveman," and "Space
Ghost." In between I would watch "School House Rock." ("Conjunction
junction, what's your function?")

 On weeknights Daisy Duke was my future wife. I was going to own the
General Lee and shoot dynamite arrows out the back. Why did they weld
the doors shut? At the movies the Nerds got Revenge on the Alpha Betas
by teaming up with the Omega Mus. I watched Indiana Jones save the Ark
of the Covenant, and wondered what Yoda meant when he said, "No, there
is another."

 Ronald Reagan was cool. Gorbachev was the guy who built a McDonalds in
Moscow. My family took summer vacations to the Gulf of Mexico and
collected "Muppet Movie" glasses along the way. (We had the whole set.)
My brother and I fought in the back seat. At the hotel we found creative
uses for Connect Four pieces like throwing them in that big air
conditioning unit.

 I listened to John COUGAR Mellencamp sing about Little Pink Houses for
Jack and Diane. I was bewildered by Boy George and the colors of his
dreams, red, gold, and green. MTV played videos. Nickelodeon played "You
Can't Do That on Television" and "Dangermouse." Cor! HBO showed Mike
Tyson pummel everybody except Robin Givens, the bad actress from "Head
of the Class" who took all Mike's cashflow.

 I drank Dr. Pepper. "I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper, wouldn't you like
to be a Pepper, too?" Shasta was for losers. TAB was a laboratory
accident. Capri Sun was a social statement. Orange juice wasn't just for 
breakfast anymore, and bacon had to move over for something meatier.

 My mom put a thousand Little Debbie Snack Cakes in my Charlie Brown
lunch box, and filled my Snoopy Thermos with grape Kool-Aid. I would
never eat the snack cakes, though. Did anyone? I got two thousand cheese
and cracker snack packs, and I ate those.

 I went to school and had recess. I went to the same classes everyday.
Some weird guy from the eighth grade always won the science fair with
the working hydro-electric plant that leaked on my project about music
and plants. They just loved Beethoven.

 Field day was bigger than Christmas, but it always managed to rain
just enough to make everybody miserable before they fell over in the
three-legged race. Where did all those panty hose come from? "Deck the
Halls with Gasoline, fa la la la la la la la la," was just a song.
Burping was cool. Rubber band fights were cooler. A substitute teacher
was a baby sitter/marked woman. Nobody deserved that.

 I went to Cub Scouts. I got my arrow-of-light, but never managed to
win the Pinewood Derby. I got almost every skill award but don't
remember ever doing anything.

 The world stopped when the Challenger exploded.

 Did a teacher come in and tell your class?

 Half of your friends' parents got divorced.

 People did not just say no to drugs.

 AIDS started, but you knew more people who had a grandparent die from
cancer.

 Somebody in your school died before they graduated.

 When you put all this stuff together, you have my childhood. If this
stuff sounds familiar, then I bet you are one, too.

 We are children of the eighties. That is what I prefer "they" call it.






Am I the only one to notice the great truth in this?

response 2 of 19:

Nov 8 05:04 UTC 1995

but it's the idea...you look at it, and know just wht the guy is talking about!
the challenger explosion was to us what kennedy being shot was to our parents.
(i dare you...can any of you NOT remember where you were at the time?)

response 4 of 19:

Nov 11 02:58 UTC 1995

Gee, someone just forwarded that to me.  I couldn't identify with much
of it though.  I guess I was sheltered.

response 6 of 19:

Dec 3 17:04 UTC 1995

I AM that child of the eighties!  I was in fifth grade when the
Challenger blew up and I saw it in Mrs. Weller's sixth grade class
room at lunch time...  We had a tv in Mrs. Finn's (my teacher's) class
room all afternoon waiting for further reports.  <sigh> 

Although, I liked Little Debbie Snack Cakes.. my da would buy so
many of them...  And Reagan was cool at one point...

I can see a lot of truth in this, and I can easily relate to just about
all, if not all, of it.. I am a Child of the Eighties. :)

response 8 of 19:

Dec 17 07:35 UTC 1995

I thought it was beautiful....seriously...  
or...maybe....RAD!!!!!

quit
whoooops, silly me

response 10 of 19:

Jul 23 06:57 UTC 1996

I remember reading about the Challenger explosion in Weekly Reader in my
kindergarten class... did anyone else read Weekly Reader from kindergarten
through, maybe third grade or so?
I also remember reading a thing in Weekly Reader where some squirrel was
telling us not to drink our parents wine coolers, even if they tasted just
like Kool-Aid.
Whatever happened to Weekly Reader?  And SRAs?

response 12 of 19:

Aug 4 22:20 UTC 1996

I was in college when then the Challenger blew up... <scott laughs at mooncat
feeling old>

response 14 of 19:

Sep 15 20:52 UTC 1996

Well, we sort of read in kindergarten.  The teacher read to us, mostly.  And
we had these little yellow books about a mouse who liked to go biking, or
something like that.  They were dirty yellow, and I forget what they were
called... oh well.
But nothing makes you feel old like going back into your old elementary
school, and like, remembering how big the lunch room tables used to be, and
looking at them now.  I had to go back for some family friend's graduation
from 5th grade last year... scary.

response 16 of 19:

Sep 17 14:55 UTC 1996

sra's!  yeeps!!!   i thought i was the only one forced to cope with those....

weekely readers were amusing....but i don't remember the one about the wine
coolers....hmmm...:)

response 18 of 19:

Sep 21 23:15 UTC 1996

Anyone else do Accelerated Reader?  It was this program my 5th grade teacher
had us do... there was a list of so many "Accelerated Reader" books, and each
one had a grade reading level and a certain number of points corresponding
to the difficulty/length of the books.  We had to read one book every two
weeks and then you got on the computer and took a multiple choice test, and
depending on how many of the 10-20 questions you got right, you got a fraction
of the points.  Me and the other nerds in the class got into some fierce
competition on this, trying to get the most points in the class, and I ended
up reading _David Copperfield_, by Charles Dickens, and I ended up getting
55 points off of that book (which was a lot, considering the majority of the
books on the list were worth 5-10 points), and taking the highest score in
the class.  But they gave this kid the award for most points who really had
something like ten less than me, but they gave him the award cause he was in
the third grade.  Ah, memories.

What are SRAs more interesting than, besides memorizing your multiplication
tables?