Word: suburbia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shriveled. But the inclination to get out of town survived. Ancient Rome had its surrounding settlements. Chaucer mentions the 'burbs in The Canterbury Tales. All the same, it wasn't until the later 20th century that suburbia was imagined as the ideal human habitation, an arrangement of houses and lives so fundamental, it was taken for granted that the Flintstones lived there...
...Suburbia required cars, highways and government-guaranteed mortgages. It also required William Levitt, who first applied a full panoply of assembly-line techniques to housing construction. That insight enabled him, and the many builders who copied him, to put up houses fast and cheap. Levitt's houses were so cheap (but still reasonably sturdy) that bus drivers, music teachers and boilermakers could afford them. And the first place he offered them was Levittown, N.Y., a town that is as much an achievement of its cultural moment as Venice or Jerusalem...
...brought the machine into the garden in a very literal way. Unlike the automobile or the radio, the home was an ancient possession, a thing too intimate to be mass-produced without offending notions of Yankee individuality that were already under intense pressure from modernity. And as Levittown matured, suburbia itself began to look like humanity at room temperature, a place where the true countryside was denatured, while the true civilization of the cities collapsed into strip malls and dinner theater...
...changed at all. We reached our destination and parked the car. The idea was to meet our two other friends inside and bowl until management kicked us out. Admittedly, these were pretty lame plans, especially for a Friday night. But for those of us living in small-town suburbia, this is as exciting as things...
Many Gen Xers hail from middle class suburbia; many have college degrees, and many are financially aided by their parents. With the retirement of the baby boomers, some predict that these twentysomethings will ease out of Gen X with the same grace that the hippies assimilated into corporate America. Yet this demographic dominates every stereotype of Gen X. And it leaves us to wonder what about the rest of the generation? What about the segment that does not have Mom, Dad or a college degree to fall back...