“We are the the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”–Willy Wonka

I grew up watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I was born the year it was released (1971) and I’d memorized every word and every beloved laugh line in Gene Wilder’s face by the time I was 10. He’d seemed so old to me back then.

We all watched Gene Wilder work his insane comedic magic and, in doing so, lift Charlie and his family out of poverty by the end of the move. We watched the “bad” kids file out of the factory with the (much) lesser prize - truck fulls of candy, but not the factory itself. No, that was reserved for Charlie.

Such hope. Such optimism.

But what did the the real children of the late sixties and early seventies actually walk away with? Raised on the promise of life-long security (a.k.a. social security, pensions, college as a path to success), we consumed media as it consumed us. We followed our parents’ lead and did what we were supposed to - going to school, taking the tests, picking a college, getting a credit card, going deeply into debt…

All of this for the promise of a 1950’s ideal that had all but evaporated by the time we graduated from highschool in the mid to late eighties. But the 1987 stock market crash and Savings & Loan Crisis (of which I know practically NOTHING about - but I plan to learn. I really, really do), changed everything. Still, we clung to the story of America which was (looking back) really our parents’ delusion. A story of the post WW II boom, and of a country where there was the promised lie of opportunity for all, and respect for other nations, and equality for women, and all races of people.

But the X generation reality told a different story, particularly because we entered the job market at precisely the time that downsizing became a popular buzzword, and pensions and social security fodder for nostalgia.

We are truly the generation that government forgot — working faithfully to enjoy a middle class that is essentially fiction, trying to exist in an economy that’s quite literally run out of fuel. Nothing I thought I knew is true. Absolutely nothing. I have a lot of reading to do.

I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ve started with the Cold War. It was a time that shaped my childhood. I remember filing out into the respective hallways of elementary, middle and highschool, turning my face to the wall(s) and covering my head as I stood alongside hundreds of other children. This was supposed to protect us from the bomb. It’s so laughable now.