All of my early life, I was told that I was sloppy, lazy, careless, and a pig, without actually being any of those things. The name-calling was used by my parents to hide their real agenda: using children as a workforce to make their lives easier. It was simple to them. Why else were we born? I was talking to my friend Katy today (while getting a haircut from her) about wild American politics, because the Russia she's from is so very different from our world here. But, times do change. We no longer allow children to get work permits from their elementary school principals for a paper route like they did when I was a kid, nor do we ask children to bear adult economic burdens by letting them leave school, like my grandparents had to do during The Great Depression.
But, my parents didn't have that to deal with. My mom had one (ONE!) part-time job during school wrapping Christmas presents at a department store (and that was only seasonal) because she complained bitterly about the homemade food my grandparents served her, so they told her to go out and get a job and go buy her own food. They were great cooks, by the way. My dad always complained about his terrible childhood and crippling poverty...with my nursing assistant grandmother and medallion-owning grandfather with his own taxi.
It never added up to their self-described portraits of severe deprivation that they continually tried to sell us as a reason for their abuses against us, especially since I grew up with my maternal grandparents a mere 5-minute drive away. Sometimes the truth could be had for a 30 second phone conversation with them, too. Into this toxic cocktail came the Baby Boomer hangover about "free" everything without any work required (just like life!) that lasted for a couple of years in the 60s when they were teenage drop-outs, followed by my parents Silent Generation of rabid consumer fantasies fueled by massive t.v. consumption, where anything can be bought for a price including happiness, again, just like real life!
Any GenX'er wanting to make it had to give lip service to a bunch of half-baked stoner ideas from the late 60s, or subliminally gay "buddy" Western movies from the repressed and deeply closeted 50s, with neither being the culturally correct stance to have. People were totally full of shit all around us, every single day, parroting lines from t.v. commercials for dish soap like a long lost savior had just given them the winning golden ticket to a better life. It was fucking insane. No one told the truth anymore, because you couldn't make money that way.
Just like fashion magazines pushed the same vapid blond as their falsely generic ideal about "American" beauty so, too, did movies "toe the line" creatively by flattering fragile Baby Boomer egos with their hugely overblown senses of self (derived mostly commercially and economically), by rehashing the old media term "slacker" as a deliberate mischaracterization of GenerationX, the same way marijuana was demonized for being dark and mad. It had absolutely no resemblance to the blue collar roots that me and my friends had coming up from the city, with some of us from the projects, while working 3 part-time jobs just to get to school.
Of course, that's the plan behind any kind of serious bullying: make up a falsehood passed off as the truth, spread it around, and then sit back to enjoy the show. While some Ritalin-dosed muthafucka easily got funding and industry backing in the early 90s to make a really bad movie about arty assholes in Austin*, the rest of us did what every real working artist does: we got a good night's sleep so we could wake up and go to work again, day after day after day. Not the exactly same picture as Hollywood's version, is it? It's not mine, either.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_(film)
