Them was murderous times

Growing up Gen X wasn't all Rubik's cubes and Aqua Net

To grow up as a Gen X kid was to know that you would very likely get snatched up and murdered. It was before kids were commonly diagnosed with anxiety, but we weren’t wrong to be anxious, because them was murderous times.

Even if you avoided being kidnapped and/or massacred by the freewheelin’ killers of the ‘70s and ‘80s, then you just were going to grow up and probably someone was going to murder you in some sadistic violent way like in the slasher films of the time. It was something bad men liked to do, and bad men could be anywhere, anytime. Really, no one was safe. It didn’t help that we were highly unsupervised kids — our parents hard at work at their jobs, then off to jazzercise or hitting up happy hour at Bennigan's — whatever parents did back then that meant they weren’t around to protect you. You knew they’d be heartbroken about your disappearance but it was just how it was gonna go.

That’s why maybe we should check our Gen X nostalgia. We may pine for when MTV was awesome; when Max Headroom passed as AI; when we were pretty good at backward roller skating — but lest we forget, them was murderous times.

Today, mass murderers have arguably replaced serial killers in that realm of the brain where we fear unprovoked violent death at the hands of some emotionally and mentally disturbed incel. Most news outlets now make efforts to avoid keeping mass shooters' names lesser published so as not to glorify them, but back in the day, serial killers' names — or possibly more menacing, their media-given nicknames — drifted from the very serious mouths of news broadcasters over the six o’clock news into our latchkey kid ears so we’d know — they were out there.

We had the Night Stalker, the Golden State Killer, and the Green River Killer. There was the Butcher Baker, The Killer Clown, and BTK (bind, torture, kill) — who gave himself his own media moniker (what a tool). We also heard of men like Ted Bundy and innocent victims like Adam Walsh. There were the Atlanta Child murders. Even if we were too young to get the horrifying reality of it all, we knew these killers represented real evil in the world and every strange man whose eyes lingered a little too long on our developing bodies was the very embodiment of stranger danger. Because them was murderous times.

Homicide rates in the 1980s really were the highest they’ve been in the life spans of Gen Xers. The U.S. Department of Justice statistics say from 1979 until 1991 roughly 10 people out of 100,000 died in a homicide most years, give or take. Sure, most of those people were not snuffed out by serial killers, but nevertheless, it simply emphasizes the facts that them was murderous times and there are statistics to prove it. After 1991, murder stats went down and have stayed down. Even as shooty as motherfuckers are today, in 2023 the murder rate was less than 7 per 100,000 people. Judging from the news, murder still seems pretty common, but serial killers seem less prolific so maybe that’s helping the numbers.

If we are honest with ourselves, as much as we dislike it, mass shootings have become pretty normalized, but I’m not sure we ever reached that same defeatist attitude involving violent random murders of the more intimate nature that serial murderers and the like perpetrated. I’m also not sure we really ever got over it, especially women. Though John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer stalked and killed men, it still seems like boys and men of our generation didn’t go through life looking over their shoulders as if some killer was going to pounce, but ladies, our spidey-senses have been on high alert from the get. That curse comes with the ovaries. It is known.

Fortunately, I survived childhood and my young adulthood in which I took plenty of risks and made some bad choices, and even had some scary encounters (yes, plural) with men who followed or chased me. I’ve never stopped looking over my shoulder, locking all the doors all the time, and carrying pepper spray when I walk the dog.

Unfortunately, Gen X-era PTSD didn’t go away. After becoming a mother, there was the bonus worry about someone snatching up one of my kids — and we all know that usually doesn’t end well. Though the FBI says in 2022 only 0.1% of missing children were taken by strangers, that’s still 296 kids too many, so even if my sons and husband think I’m overly protective, when they were younger, I was compelled to regularly remind them not to get kidnapped or killed because thems always murderous times.