Gen X – The last generation to have personal freedom
Wed 12:53 pm +00:00, 3 Dec 2025 2
Source: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/02/the-last-generation/#more-383414
Ditto here in the Uk, not exactly the same but similar freedoms for youngsters
All gone now
Before the ’90s, men drove cars and kids rode bicycles – without helmets. Now men wear helmets to ride a bicycle and kids aren’t allowed to ride in a car unless they are strapped into a “safety” seat.
I am thankful I was born just in the nick of time to avoid growing up in what this country has become. Gen X was the last generation to experience a degree of personal freedom unimaginable today.
Imagine, if you can, being a high school kid and going outside for a smoke – and not being tackled by a School Resource Officer (i.e., a cop). There did not used to be cops in high schools unless they had to be called – and that literally never happened during my high school years, back in the ’80s. There were no metal detectors and the doors weren’t locked, either. You could just walk in – or out – without having to “check in.” No one wore ID tags. It was a high school. Not a prison. Not yet. Not then.
There was a smoking arcade – a place outside where the kids who wanted a smoke could go to have a smoke. Unimaginable today. The adults aren’t allowed to smoke. And it is not about smoking. It is about being free to do so, if you wanted to. This is the important distinction.
That freedom is a distant memory.
We all drove cars without air bags or ABS and none of us ever “buckled up” because we weren’t ordered to. Yes, I know Safety First! The problem is that when Safety comes First, freedom comes second. Which of the two is more valuable? Americans used to value freedom more. If someone wanted to wear a seatbelt, that was ok. But no one was under pressure to wear one and that was a wonderful thing. Not because it entailed more risk but because we were free to decide for ourselves whether we thought the risk was such that wearing a seatbelt was necessary. Imagine that. People – high school kids – free to weigh risks and make choices for themselves.
When we were just sixteen-years-old, we could take our younger siblings for a ride. I drove my fours-years-younger sister to her friend’s houses all the time. She did not have to sit in a “safety” seat – or in the rear seat. She just jumped into the car and I took her over to her friend’s house and picked her up later, per my mom and dad’s instructions. High school kids were treated as almost-adults, once.
I was able to buy beer – legally – when I was 18. This seemed fair since at 18 I could also be drafted and made to “serve” in the military. Gen X was the last generation that could legally buy beer at 18 rather than 21, as today – when an 18-year-old can be forced to “serve” (and kill or be killed, potentially) but is not considered old enough to be served beer. 
We got carded sometimes. But no one did who was obviously older than 40. Such idiocy – for that is what it is – would have been unimaginable back then. You carded kids. You didn’t degrade middle-aged adults with “store policy” idiocy.
Our IDs back then were also easily modified so as to make it easier to buy beer – because they were just dot-matrix-printed paper things. No bar codes. Not even a photo, if you can imagine that. Photos came along later in the ’80s – and if you were not yet 18, you got a side profile photo rather than the full-face photo, conveying your fully (legally) adult status at 18. 
There was no such thing – yet – as “zero tolerance” for alcohol, another hysteria of current times when a 17-year-old can be arrested for “drunk” driving if he is found to have any alcohol in his system. You used to have to be actually drunk – and showing it – to get pulled over by a cop. Now you pull yourself over – at “sobriety” checkpoints, where it is on you to convince the cop you aren’t “drunk.”
When we got to college, later on in the ’80s, we took classes. We didn’t receive lectures about pronouns. It was ok to be openly straight. When we got out of college we got out of our parents’ house, chiefly because we could. Because we didn’t have a debt anvil hanging around our necks and because a college degree was worth something, once. All of us owned our own cars by then. And most of us soon had our own places.
It was a very different time – and it was only 40 years ago.
Sometimes, it feels a lot longer ago.
A few months ago RT journalist Steve Sweeney want to the UK to visit his daughter. He was held at customs and grilled for several hours and one of the question he was asked was ?don’t you love your country’, perhaps due to his preference to live in Lebanon and work for, heaven forbid, a Russian news station.
I loved the country in which I grew up and had a very happy childhood, but that was then. My step-brother was many years older than me and as a teenager in the 1940s he and his mates used to take off in the morning at holiday time and weekends and nobody worried about their welfare; they went home when they were hungry or tired.
Nobody asked us but I’m sure we loved our country, not the pale shadow of the pseudo-democracy it has become.
Same for me Belyi, I grew up in the late ’50’s and had total freedom as a kid. Mum used to say “go out and play” if she’d had enough of me and my brother. Which meant go and find something to do away from the house. Wherever you want, no restrictions, no rules. I was about 7 or 8 years old, my bro 13 months younger. We were perfectly safe, everyone knew who we were and everyone looked out for everyone else in our large estate. Everyone knew who the wrong un’s were too, and safety in numbers. It was idyllic tbh, new estate on the edge of the village, still being built. So building sites as a playground. And with lots of farmland with small family farms nearby, barns, haystacks the lot, another playground. Best of both worlds for us kids
My country never came into it but if I’d been asked did I love my country then, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say yes. I loved my life, free and happy with wonderful parents too and a wonderful community as well. Most were scousers who’d moved out of town like us. Salt of the earth and full of laughter and fun, but tough with it too. Knew how to handle themselves if required. It rarely was