Impact of Generation X

Re “Smashing the Gen-X Stereotype,” Sept. 3: Buried near the end of your story on the growing entrepreneurship of Gen-X was the most telling fact about its members’ irrelevance to modern culture: their lack of politics.

Members of Gen-X have made the massive miscalculation that their too-hip cynicism and aloofness from politics give them a kind of moral superiority. By being disengaged from politics, they are dis-empowered. Witness the artistic efforts of Gen-X in art, music, film, fashion, literature, you name it. Without a political point of view to inform one’s art, what can one possibly have to say?

As a long-time political activist working on environmental and labor issues, I have nothing but contempt for my own generation, so-called Gen-X. While some may finally be getting their “rudderless” lives together through business efforts, their deafening silence on political matters will be their true legacy. Gen-X often cannibalizes earlier art forms for its ever-changing version of cool--what we call retro. I really worry that when it becomes hip to be political and they adopt that as a fashion--since posing seems an end in itself for Gen-X--which politics, uninformed by study or practice, will they adopt?

JEFF SOFTLEY

Los Angeles

* Realizing that members of Gen-X are anything but slackers, last year we refocused our magazine, Business Start-Ups, to target Generation X entrepreneurs. Since then, we have received an incredible response from young readers who have launched their own businesses or are planning to do so.

The vitality and energy of Generation X are powering the Internet revolution that’s revitalizing our economy. A wasted generation? Definitely not.

KAREN AXELTON

Irvine