The Gen X Chronicles: Part Six - The Challenger

January 28, 1986: The launch and structural failure of the Challenger Space Shuttle.

As far as events that happened on American soil that affected the American Gen X psyche the most, this would be one of the most important - some would even say the most important.

The Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, CA is what I refer to as "The Gen X Chronicles" because it documents many of the world events that happened during the formative years of Generation X which is a big piece of our collective experience. One section of the museum focuses on the Challenger launch.  Gen Xers on the East Coast remember this event happening around noon of their school day. For Gen Xers like me who lived further out west, we remember this happening in the morning, with most of the school day ahead of us. We remember the strangeness of going through the motions of the rest of the day when an enormous catastrophe had happened. The structural failure of the Challenger and the simultaneous death of seven American heroes that all of us school kids had spent so much time getting to know from our classrooms, left an enormous impression on us. 

Below is the Challenger Space Shuttle in a fleeting moment of exquisite beauty - clear blue sky, and an explosion of heat that was meant to propel those on board to the stars. Did these birds, rising up in their choreographed movement with the lift-off know that disaster was only moments away?

Though parts of that day are now hazy for me, I am able to recall moments of it with intensity - the moments that were the heaviest with the most sorrow and confusion are the moments I remember most clearly. I remember that all of us at my elementary school were very unprepared for what happened. For some reason, I was a visitor that day in a different classroom than my own, the one next door to mine, and I remember being gathered with other kids around a TV full of anticipation. When the unthinkable happened before our eyes, the teacher became clearly upset and very quickly shut off the TV. Through the eyes of a child, I interpreted her response as anger at us as she abruptly told me and others to leave her room immediately and go straight back to our regular class. I couldn't completely process what was happening. I couldn't figure out why we she was so agitated at us, and I couldn't figure out what we had done wrong. Through the eyes of an adult, it is clear that she was holding in a huge amount of emotion and was trying not to cry in front of us. She was in a very difficult and awkward situation. The walk back to my regular classroom was also very awkward. Because I could not process everything and because the shuttle images on the TV had gotten turned off so fast as I watched them, there was a part of me who thought maybe everything was still okay, that the explosion we saw was maybe just coming from some piece of debris that had fallen off the shuttle, and that everything was going as planned. It took the rest of the school day for me to slowly process the tragedy that had happened, and the whole day felt surreal. After a very long time of anticipating this amazing day and moment, it all came to an end in a way we hadn't expected. A certain emptiness hovered above my head, above my school, and above my country. 

A few weeks later I wrote letters of consolation to each of the seven families. So did a lot of people.

This is the footage being played next to this exhibit - the 1/28/86 presidential address that many watched as they were experiencing the shock of the event... 

Just after the two minute point of the clip is his message to us as Gen X kids: "...the future doesn't belong to the fainthearted, it belongs to the brave...." When I look at what my generation had to endure in the following decades all I can say is that those words proved to be true:

I used to walk through museums as a child and wonder why old people would be quietly shedding tears in corners after seeing mementos of some war or time in history that they had personally experienced. Back then, life for me was new and I had almost nothing to look back on. After seeing images of things that have affected me personally at museums or in documentaries, I am now the one trying to hold back the tears. This was just one of many crises that would play out in the lives of Gen Xers. 


To those who saw the launch of the Challenger in pixels, and to those who saw this in person, you did not experience this alone.  We all experienced this together. 

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(c) 2012 Writing and photography by Chloe, original photography from the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum, Simi Valley, CA. 

The Gen X Chronicles: Part Five - The Berlin Wall as the Sun Descends

The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the significant world events of Gen X's formative years. From where it stood in Europe, it saw many days of cold, gray skies. Now a large piece of it looks out over the Simi Valley to the mountains where the sun descends on the desert and ocean breezes travel over open land. With my hand reverently touching the cement, I could feel a certain hope - I could feel it swallowing up hopelessness.

There have been walls in my life that held me in, that seemed insurmountable, that I feared would never let me out. When I have found the grace and the resolve to walk past those walls, it is has been astounding how those barriers began to seem so small compared to the limitless possibilities around them. Caught up in the problems we are facing today, it feels that things will never change. It's the larger picture that shows us that the potential of our lives is enormous. Beyond that, if we look out on the horizon, even while holding the broken pieces in our pockets of this fallen world that has disappointed us, we are reminded that there is something beyond this, something more than just this.

For those who grew up in a time of unraveling and seemingly endless crises in history, may you live to see a time when you can walk around it, and then past all of it, through the shadows of impermanence, and into the light of what does not fail us.  

May the possibilities swallow up the limits, may the hope swallow up the hopelessness.   

When our generation's time on this earth is done, when we are finally done walking the expanse of this day and age, may all of us get to that place on the horizon that we can now only strain to get even a glimpse of a place where there has never been walls, a place where there will be no more sorrow, a place where there will be no more pain....



"For believe me, this world that seems to us so substantial, is no more than shadowlands.  Real life has not yet begun."

                                                                                                                                    -  C.S. Lewis

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(c) 2012 photography and writing by Chloe - all rights reserved

The Gen X Chronicles: Part Four - The West Side of the Berlin Wall

While there are many pieces of the Berlin wall more or less this size in different parts of the world, I think this six ton piece is the most beautiful one. I was hoping to get some photos of this piece in California where it stands in the warm sun each day. I can't think of a more monumental symbol of history from the growing-up years of Generation X than the crumbling of this wall. So it was with enormous anticipation that I walked up to this slab of cement that includes the word "freedom" written on it. It was with humility for what this wall symbolized that I took these photos....

The Berlin Wall: Photography by Chloe

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In the weeks before approaching this wall, I imagined what it would be like to take photos of it. I was hoping that I could catch the sun behind it as it was descending. Beyond that, I was hoping I could capture sunflare coming out from behind the wall, exploding in colorful hues to mirror the artful graffiti on the cement. Everything I hoped for that day came true.

My guess is that these images came from a spray paint can held in the hands of a German Gen Xer. I hope to someday find out who it is. Here, in this beauty, is the artful soul of mankind that finds another way to survive, to begin again, and to create.   

Here's to hope...and to new beginnings.

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(c) 2013 photography and writing by Chloe - all rights reserved

The Gen X Chronicles: Part Three - The East Side of The Berlin Wall

I had thought that the entire Berlin wall was in a million tiny pieces. I'd seen fragments of the wall that could fit in your hand that friends had bought or received as gifts - gray cement with remnants of graffiti on one side - like too many puzzle pieces to ever be put back together. Watching the news as the people broke those pieces away with pick axes, hammers, chisels, and even bare human hands  was one of the most important historical memories in my Generation X youth.  Until recently, I didn't realize there are enormous slabs of the Berlin Wall in different parts of the world as monuments to history. One of these places is in Simi Valley, CA. 

When I look at the east side of this wall in all of its bleakness, I cannot help but think of how this is just one of a billion different walls that humans have created for each other over time. Throughout history, people and institutions have spent a lot of time trying to hold things in, or keep things out. These walls are created when you feel that any move you make will be judged unfairly. They are created when someone does something to make everyone else live in fear. They  are created when someone tells you that you cannot do something or that you are not good enough, or that or that your perceptions are not credible or that you are not allowed to believe what you believe.

Irina Ratushinska, a Russian Orthodox Christian writer, found herself in a Soviet labor camp for her ideas and beliefs. As a prisoner, Irina carved her poetry into bars of soap, and memorized the words until she washed them away. These words became books that were published later when she gained her freedom. 

So, reader, have you truly found your voice?

Does some wall hold you back? If some bar of soap or scrap of paper is near you, you can start writing now, you can start planning now.  If some laptop or stack of books is near you, you can start researching now.  Get ready now to speak the truth - when the walls come crumbling down, your story will be told - nothing, and no one will stop you.


"Gray is the color of hope."  

                                                                                         -Irina Ratushinska

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(c) 2012 photography and writing by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved

The Gen X Chronicles: Part Two - Gen X Christmas Trees

At the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley, CA, I got a chance to photograph a seasonal exhibit of Christmas trees - each one a representation of events and pop culture through each decade over the past century. I took pictures of the trees representing the decades that have had the most relevance to Generation X....

The 1970s tree: includes references to Sesame Street, disco, attempts at peace, Star Wars, Jaws....

The 1980s tree includes: E.T., Pac Man, a new presidential administration, the Cabbage Patch Kid, Nintendo, MTV....  

The 1990s tree includes: AOL, the Simpsons, cordless phones, globalization, Furby, Cheers' 200th episode?

The 2000s tree: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, energy issues/hybrid cars, raising the flag at Ground Zero...

A lot has happened these past few decades....

Merry Christmas, X. 



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(c) 2012 photography and writing by Chloe Koffas (Christmas trees by Reagan Museum volunteers) 

The Gen X Chronicles: Part One - The World We Grew Up In

I recently had a chance to visit the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley, CA. Another name this museum could go by is "The Gen X Chronicles."  There was so much to photograph and write about here, I decided to turn it into a series. For the better part of a decade during the formative years of Gen X, Reagan was the U.S. president, and this museum documents the things that happened during those years. These are the events that had a huge impact on the collective psyche of Gen X.   

There is an area of the museum that has a collage of photos of the era when Reagan came into office as President, along with words that described the issues of the time: shortages, gas lines, job issues, unfair taxes, frustration....

For us, there were little to no golden years.

The Olympics are so important to kids - all our hopes and dreams became manifest in the amazing abilities of athletes we looked up to. Except for when it got cancelled. This might have been when the Cold War became more painfully real to kids who could not yet understand it. 

Stagflation: when the inflation rate is high, economics are slow and jobs are few. An image of an empty factory with the windows busted out. The purpose of the "Morning in America" campaign was to address all these troubling issues, but honestly, I don't really remember it ever feeling like a new day. 

This has been a tough existence.

These are just a few images of what was happening in the news in the formative years of Gen X. As we grew up and became more aware of the world in which we live in, all of this was weighing on our minds along with many other things. 

Unemployment, layoffs, plant closures, double digit inflation. This is all part of what caused Gen X to become a nomadic generation from childhood. I remember one year of elementary school when I watched most of my friends move away one by one because their parents had lost their jobs. Then it was time for me to move away, too, and be the new kid yet again at another school. 

Watching these and other news images as the world distentegrated caused much of the anti-establishment and hypervigilance that became part of us. The hardest thing about looking at these images is that many of these issues are still a reality. The recessions we witnessed in our childhoods is now the Great Recession we must deal with as adults. I saw the Gen X kids on the news picketing and holding up poster board signs demanding their parents' jobs back. Now I watch them on the news standing in unemployment lines, worrying about how to feed their own kids. 

Got a Gen Xer in your life who tries not to be negative, but often assumes the worst will happen?

Cut them some slack. 

People become who they are for a reason.

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(c) 2012 Photos and writing by Chloe/original images from the Reagan Museum.

Battle Born

The Killers often get compared to U2 or to Springsteen. Both of these influences surface in their music, along with other 80s sounds that even sometimes sound a bit like an old Atari game. Bono said he thinks The Killers will be the next biggest/best band in the world. He also said he would give a copy of the Hot Fuss album to the Pope to demonstrate that rock music is not evil.  A lot of the band's lyrics are wrought with true struggle, biblical imagery, a candidness about the broken down state of ourselves and the world, and a very intelligent sense of humor - all lyrics that I feel only a Gen Xer could write. 

Brandon Flowers, the lead singer, is LDS and was born at the tail end of the Gen X window. All the other members are Gen X as well.  At one point when Brandon saw Oasis play at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas where he lives, he realized his calling was to be in a band. 



We saw the Killers live in Portland on Dec 5th for the Battle Born Tour for an incredible show. 

A shower of metallic confetti rains down on Portlanders at the Rose Garden Arena.

Up agains the wall
There's something dying on the street
When they knock you down
You're gonna get back on your feet
No you can't stop now

...

Come on show your face
Come on give us one more spark
So we'll start a fire
Unless we fall into the dark
And you can't stop now - no you can't stop now

- From "Battle Born"



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(c) 2012 photography and writing by Chloe Koffas- all rights reserved