IMHO, the primary factor that distinguishes Generation X from the generation to come after is that we were the last to grow up with nuclear paranoia.

I am 23 years old. Many of my co-workers are between 18 and 20. Not much age difference, you would say, and you would be right. And yet I can feel a generation gap between them and myself.

They never woke up in the middle of the night as a child hearing an airplane overhead and thinking it might be a Soviet bomber. They never heard a tractor-trailer rumble by and wonder if what they heard was Washington to the south being vaporized. They don't remember when the United States had an insane criminal for a President. And sometimes I envy them that.