There’s a conversation going around right now about Gen X and how many of them went MAGA. It’s been scrolling past on my phone between sips of coffee for about a week, and I keep landing on the same thought. It could have been me.
To be fair, I’m technically a millennial. I was born in 1993, which makes me the little sister of that generation. But they raised me. They babysat me, coached my softball team, taught my Sunday school class, and handed me the same picture of the world they’d been handed. And I’m a Heather, after all. The name practically came with a pleated skirt.
Here’s the picture I grew up with. Chew bubble gum. Wear the pleated skirt. Go to class. Get good grades. Do two extracurriculars, so it looks good without spreading yourself thin. (Mine were choir and yearbook.) Don’t date until college. On Sunday, go to church with Grandma and sit in her pew, third from the front on the left side, because that’s where she sits.
I loved it, and I still do. I don’t want to make it sound like a cage, because it felt more like a quilt. It was warm, it was familiar, and somebody I loved had stitched each square of it.
The faces at school, at church, and at the grocery store in Lancaster County looked like mine. They prayed like me and lived on roads with farms on them. I don’t think anyone planned it that way. There just weren’t a lot of other people around. When the only casserole at the potluck is the one your family brought, you grow up thinking that’s what dinner is.
Then I went to Millersville. It’s barely down the road from where I grew up, but it opened a door. There was a girl on my floor whose family celebrated holidays I hadn’t heard of, and she explained them to me over instant noodles at one in the morning. A guy in my communications class grew up in Philadelphia and thought cows were hilarious. A professor asked me a question about my own beliefs, and I realized I’d only learned the answers, never the reasons. None of these people were trying to change me. They were just living their lives near enough for me to see.
Later I got to travel a little. I saw some of the places I’d only met in movies, and the movies had gotten a lot of it wrong. In one kitchen I couldn’t read a single label, and a grandmother who wasn’t mine fed me like I was one of hers. I recognized that feeling right away. It was Sunday dinner at my grandma’s, in a different language.
So here’s where I’ve landed. I still love the ideas I grew up with: church, good grades, being polite, showing up for your neighbors. I just know now that they aren’t the only ones that work. As far as I can tell, people need three things. They need a full belly, they need to feel safe, and they need to feel loved. I’ve seen a lot of different recipes that get people there, and once they’re there, I don’t think the rest matters much.
So when people say Gen X went MAGA, I want to raise my hand, softly, from my corner table. We didn’t all go MAGA. But we were all raised on the same single picture, handed to us so many times it started to look like the only one. Some of us just got a chance to look over the fence and see what else was out there.
If you got that chance too, maybe save a spot at the fence for somebody who didn’t.
Today’s scarf is the blue plaid one from my aunt, the first scarf she gave me. I wore it on purpose.
My algorithm runs on kindness. Stay clean, stay kind, stay caffeinated.
— Heather
