Historic Gen X Events
Overview (1965- 1980)
If America values freedom, stable principles, traditional families, truth, justice, law and order, mercy and grace, and equal rights, it must protect against anything undermining these values. While Christ's message is the answer, it's essential that the Church plays a significant role in addressing these struggles.
1 Corinthians 15:58 - "Therefore, my beloved believers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."
Despite enduring significant tragedies, Generation X (Gen X) adults demonstrate remarkable resilience, as they are far more likely to value their religion some other generations.
Gen X experienced significant cultural change and distrust in America. The chaos of the Vietnam War, political protests, assassinations, American hostages in Iran, and the suffering of US veterans from Agent Orange all contributed to a radical shift in culture and growing distrust in the nation and its political leadership.
Gen X also witnessed several positive events that shaped their worldview. These include advances in the Civil Rights movement, the founding of many of today's multinational tech giants, success in the Space Race, and the Hippie Revival. These events continue to inspire hope for the future. You can learn more details using the Year Selector above.
1965 — Quest for Equality
The 1960s was an era when people were looking to change long-standing inequalities, a period marked by protest marches and assassinations. First, President Kennedy was assassinated in 1962, and the records of it locked away, and still not fully released in 2024. Then Robert Kennedy, his brother, was assassinated. That was followed by the assassination of Malcolm X, a more radical Black activist, in 1965. Bloody Sunday occurred in Alabama in March when a group of civil rights marchers were attacked and brutalized while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL. This resulted in outrage and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Johnson on August 6, 1965. The Epicenters of unrest were in Deep South states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia that had practiced slavery and then passed Jim Crow legislation after the Civil War set all Blacks free.
1966 — Civil Right, Black Empowerment, Radicalization
The 1960s were a time of change. What started as a peaceful movement for equality in rights morphed into a Black power and pride movement, that manifest itself in urban riots and clashes with law enforcement. Hot spots were Atlanta, Selma, Jackson, and Montgomery in the South and NYC, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia in the North and Los Angeles on the West Coast.
1967 — Vietnam Protests Switch into High Gear
Due to the unpopularity of the War in Vietnam and the drop in voluntary recruitment, the Selective Service Act of 1967 was signed into law based upon a lottery of those who did not have some deferment from service. This resulted in many of those of draft age fleeing the country to Canada and others enrolling in college, which for two years provided a deferment. This resulted in mass anti-war demonstrations on college campuses and many anti-war protest songs.
1968 - Age of Loss
1968 continued the civil rights and women's rights movements, and brought to light disparities between opportunities in black and white America. Rowan and Martin had a hit show called Laugh-in, which can still be found on networks that specialize in old TV programs.
The civil rights movement continued, led by Martin Luther King being assassinated, culminating a series of 4 assassinations starting with President Kennedy in 1962. All of these assassinations were for different reasons, but demonstrated a propensity for killing. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement continued to reform America.
1969 - To The Moon, Alice!
Apollo 11 landed on the moon, validating America's space race with the Soviets and bringing fame to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The planned return to the moon led by Neil Armstrong in Apollo 13 later failed badly because of defects in an oxygen tank, ending America's trips to the lunar surface for the next six decades. The movie Apollo 13 is worth watching, particularly concerning the problems with the Boeing Starliner and their commercial airliners today.
Meanwhile, Hippies met at Woodstock, NY to drink, do drugs, listen to music, get high and have sex in public. The divide between older and younger generations widened, and the civil rights movement moved ahead. While many came to the Lord in the Hippie Revival, the Church did a poor job of discipling them, as the return of Jesus was assumed to be very soon. As a result, almost the entire harvest of souls was lost, and many turned to become liberals or communists instead of well-grounded Christians.
1970 - A Very Unsettled Period Continued
While the Vietnam War was going on, OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) imposed an oil embargo on the US, due to its support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war. This resulted in fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations in the US, a new experience for Americans. The chaos surrounding the Vietnam War would continue for another three years.
1971 — The U.S. Dollar Backed by Nothing
President Nixon unlinked the U.S. dollar from the Gold standard, meaning that nothing but the good faith of America stood behind it. As a result, the national debt began to rise quickly after that, and the FED was free to print whatever money necessary for reckless US government expansion and sell treasury bonds to finance the growing debt. At the time, the Debt/GDP ratio was 31.1%. In the 38 years that followed, every administration raised the ratio until 2008, when the National Debt/GDP ratio had grown to 63.9%.
1972 — Lobbying to Legalize Abortion
The sexual revolution and Hippie lifestyle resulted in many unwanted pregnancies, back-rooms, illegal abortions, and medical complications. There was a push to legalize abortion, if for no other reason than to reduce the complications of illegal abortions that were occurring. The abortion lobby promised that legal abortions would be done properly, under sanitary conditions, with few complications to the women undergoing them. Legalization came a year later, based on a SCOTUS case. The Catholic Church took the lead in opposing this solution to the unwanted pregnancy problem but was undermined by its growing scandal of priest and clergy sexual molestation and abuse.
1973 — Post Vietnam War Chaos and Abortions
With the U.S. withdrawal from the war without victory, chaos escalated as millions of American soldiers returned with addictions, severe permanent disabilities, exposure to Agent Orange defoliants and some with Vietnamese wives and families — most of which were not embraced by mainstream Americans. The result of having lost the War was division and rejection, leading to little help coping with PTSD, continued drug addictions, withdrawal from society to live in remote areas of the country, and suicide — conditions which VA Hospitals did not do well resolving.
Sowing the Seeds of Legalized Abortion
1973 was also the year that SCOTUS made abortions legal in the famous Roe v. Wade case. By 2024, almost 65 million babies have been dismembered without anesthetic and vacuum extracted from the wombs carrying them, rather than delivered and put up for adoption.
The Blood and Grace of Jesus is The Answer
Abortion is clearly a complex problem without a simple solution; one that American culture has not yet found a workable solution to. Meanwhile, the blood of those aborted cry out to God. Until a Godly solution is found do, abortion will continue to be useful to Satan to divide and weaken America along gender and ethnic lines.
God's grace, mercy and righteousness are needed regardless of the personal decisions individuals have made regarding this issue. Only God can provide that, and people would be wise to turn to Him in order to repent and be set free. This could be addressed by national spiritual revival as well.
1974 — On the Threshold of the PC's Birth
IBM introduced its first 7094 computer mainframe around January 1962. The word length was 8 bits, and the clock speed was 1 million byte/second. Instructions were submitted by reading card decks into it, and it had compilers for FORTRAN and Cobol for scientific and business computing applications. (The average cellphone today is far more powerful than that mainframe that occupied hundreds of square feet of air-conditioned space and cost millions of dollars). Before 1975, when Apple and Microsoft introduced Personal Computer companies, IBM's 3850 series, with a total mass storage of 236 Gigabytes, used system network architecture (SNA) to allow multiple-user access. At this time, Intel had introduced the 8008, an 8-bit microprocessor embedded in the Scelbi 8H computer. It had 4 KB of memory and was focused on scientific and biological applications. Portable computers were much more limited. The space race to the Moon and the Space Shuttle that came after it was advanced, but there was a flight computer in the Space Shuttle that used memory of only 40,000 (16-bit) words stored in magnet core memory operating at 2 Megahertz clock speed.
Since then, the development of computers has been astronomical over the last 50 years. The CPU used by some today to post this has 20 microprocessor cores running simultaneously, each of which provides 64-bit words, running at 2.8 gigahertz (2,800 times faster than those described above) and has 512 Gigabytes of main memory in its Intel i9 processors. Attached storage is around 16 terabytes (16 trillion bytes of online hard disk storage, accessible within 7 milliseconds).
Based on new AI chips being developed by Nvidia, chips that will be available in the next 24 months will make today's Intel i9 appear small, slow, and underpowered by comparison. Today's AI scientists believe that man is on the verge of creating a computing machine that has senescent and general intelligence, and when it does, will label it as God, and plan to integrate and interface it with their human minds.
1975—Mainframe to Personal Computer Technology Emergency
Early Computers Are Mainframe + Batch Processing System
Until 1975, most serious computing was conducted on mainframes, which were large computers produced by companies like IBM, Rand Corporation, and Cray Corporation. For the most part, to access the mainframe, you had to be at the data center where it was located. The primary mode of operation during this time was “batch processing.” Only later would remote access and time-sharing CPU resources emerge. Companies like Hewlett Packard helped to reduce the size of data centers by creating business computers that allowed 10 to 25 users to submit, compile, and execute different programs on a single mini-computer using time-sharing for the CPU core and memory.
Apple & Microsoft Pioneer Personal Computer The early attempts at time-sharing operating systems were often crude, unreliable, and prone to crashes and slowdowns. Nevertheless, once personal computing gained momentum, the development and evolution of personal computers accelerated rapidly, with both Apple and Microsoft making significant technological advancements. Subsequently, the terminals that could submit these programs were located outside to the data center utilizing the Internet, a network evolved from the DOD, which was being used for military purposes.
Along the way personal computer emerged. Microsoft, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, developed a version of BASIC (an early programming language) for the Altair 8800 microcomputer, one of the first personal computers. Later, new software compilers were expanded beyond Fortran and COBOL, to include Pascal, Smalltalk, C, Ada, C++, Perl, Haskell, Python, Visual Basic, Ruby, Java and PHP, C#, Lua and Rust. Each offered basics, plus a set of more unique operations or interactions with various operating systems. Some were higher level abstractions, while others were more aware of the computer architecture that they were being run on, offering the programmer more control over things like memory management and housekeeping.
Multiple Software Languages Emerge As personal computer platforms evolved, they took very different paths. Microsoft chose Intel as its microchip provider, while Apple opted to develop its own microprocessor, resulting in a proprietary and more expensive product. Apple also licensed PostScript as the display language for its screens, whereas Microsoft’s computer manufacturers used bit-mapped graphics. Both companies thrived and became profitable, going public and providing substantial returns for their shareholders. Each released suites of products for various business applications and allowed for third-party software applications to be hosted on their platforms. The Internet provided the reliable communications network to connect everything together.
1976 — Bicentennial Celebrated and Technology Emergence
One of the most significant events of 1976 was the Founding of Apple Computer by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. This was only a year after Microsoft was founded. It was also the year of America's Bicentennial Celebration. The Copyright Act of 1976 made sweepingcould not updates to copyright laws, expanding them for electronic and video media. Gerald Ford, interim President after Nixon resigned, was not able to hold the Presidency, and lost to Jimmy Carter.
1977 — Political Change Under Carter Administration
Jimmy Carter was President and signed the Federal Reserve Reform Act to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. This was referred to as the dual mandate. Also, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed to reduce discrimination in real estate lending in black, urban communities with high crime rates. Banking began expanding into the Internet and mobile banking.
This was the year the US Space Shuttle joined the Russian Space Station in a rare episode of multinational cooperation in space. O.J. Simpson was found liable under a civil suit for the deaths of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman in February, after being acquitted in federal court.
In 1997 interest rates were relatively low and stable, business was expanding and commercial real-estate was growing.
Events 1978-1979
In 1978, Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accords to bring peace between Egypt and Israel, which led to peace briefly in the Middle East. It did not, however, solve the problem of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which was a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood. It remained a militant population that began weaponizing the entire Gaza territory it occupied.
During this same period, President Carter continued the normalization of US relations with Communist China, which President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had started during the Nixon administration. He also began the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT III) to control nuclear arms but could not get the US Senate to ratify it. Carter, a Christian, attempted to elevate global human rights as a factor in U.S. trade and foreign policy relations but was undermined by the U.S. State Dept. and never achieved this goal.
1979-1980 Iran Hostage Crisis Ends
After the Iranian revolution that saw the Shah of Iran replaced by a radical Islamic regime, Iran seized the US Embassy in Iran, took Americans hostage and held them for months. This was another crack in the power and prestige of the US as a world power. President Carter was totally ineffective in getting them released, and his incompetence cost the Democrats the election in 1980. Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 and was able to arrange their release shortly after he took office. Reagan was the first Republican elected after the failed Presidency of Richard Nixon, who resigned shortly after winning re-election due to the Watergate Scandal during the 1972-1974 time frame.