Boomers too visible

Regarding “Boomers’ cloak of invisibility” (Nov. 18): All my life, I’ve grown up in the shadow of the first generation that actually got its own name. Every step of their lives has been trumpeted in the media, on television, in the movies: How the baby boomers are going to change the world! How the boomers changed education as children, changed music in their teens, redefined morality in the 1960s; how boomers will redefine growing old.

Nobody had ever heard of teenagers before marketers targeted teenaged boomers. Nobody had ever heard of midlife crises until the boomers hit their 40s. When boomers started hitting their 50s, restaurants dropped the age of their senior menus.

Now all those articles are about how the millennials will change the world. As for the generation in between, we’re so invisible they still can’t come up with an actual name for us, just “X.”

I would be interested: Which day of the week does The Spokesman-Review feature an entire section focused on the needs and life lessons of the Gen-Xers? As for feeling ignored by egocentric younger folks, maybe the original “Me generation” is simply reaping a little of what it has sown.

Michael Liljenberg

Spokane Valley