Generation Why

I am told that in the age of extended adolescence I am part of Generation Y. As I understand it, that means I have a short attention span and an insatiable desire for instant information. I’ve never had the patience to find out if that is true.

There have been a few times in my life I have felt the electric crackle of being alive at just the right moment, thankful to be born at just the right time. A cloudy memory of my mother telling me to remember this day in October of 1989, as we watched the Berlin Wall tumble. I remember life coursing through me 10 years later as I watched a city exploding with prosperous light on a Fourth of July during the height of the 90s – how lucky I felt to be not only alive, but young! There was also the uniquely arbitrary camaraderie shared at the bombastic dual end of a century and a millennium. But my most distinct memory was the last time that I felt this generational charge. It was also the day that my hope of ever feeling that way again began to die.

I attended a fairly large state university whose good reputation and picturesque campus were occasionally besmirched by sports scandals, high rankings in ambiguous party school listings, as well as several unprovoked drunken riots where thousands of inebriated scholars poured into the streets for no apparent reason. They were demonstrating their accord with cheap drink specials and an adamant disagreement with legally parked cars (at least ones light enough to lift in their riotous path). After several couches were burned in the street, tear gas and what now seems like mild police violence was enough to cease the unruly. It was amazing the way a current could sweep through throngs like a raucous wind pushing so many to such an amebic end. But for what? The voices of my generation were heard, and they were crying, “Let’s do body shots!” As my civic and political mind grew I proudly slapped a bumper sticker on my car that said, “Save the couches!” Was this all my generation had to say?

The election of 2000 happened.

My stomach twisted on itself and over again with each undulation of the month of push, pull, shove and grope that followed this flabbergasting scene. How could this be happening? I watched as the crimson tide of corruption slowly rose over the brink and drown my hope. I reeled backward, stunned by the inability or unwillingness of not just the masses but my contemporaries as well to see this assault on logic, truth, and democracy that was being played out in Florida. I joined in the few small protests that arose, and watched my contemporaries sit vapid. My mind whirled with terrifying prophecies of what this future, my future, would hold - though they would prove woefully tame to what was in store. As this stolen, unqualified, nepotistic presidency tripped and stumbled its way down an unpopular path for the first year my hope again flickered alive. My generation may lack patience to a fault, but surely we were least patient with incompetence.

September 11th happened.

Before the smoke cleared the rhetoric began and the guns blazed. The chance of a lifetime had fallen from the sky onto a group with an inhuman and wicked ability to ruthlessly politicize and use a city and a nation’s tragedy. My own government would prove equally revolting. The Fool and the Devil wielded patriotism in a way that would have made Stalin blush. Orwellian fear was blanketed over the American people, and they cuddled up to it and turned their citizen minds away as a war was launched in their name, civil rights trampled, and lines drawn in the sand. Cowering as a fool simplified the world for us. Good, evil, with, against. Pro-American sentiment was shattered, pro-western movements were halted. It was beyond stopping progress, it was regression.

And the war drums sounded and the sabers rattled. Saddam could soon be in Peoria, packing a nuclear punch. Preempt! Preempt! This dark evil must be quashed from the map before it can assail the great red, white, and blue bastion of freedom standing strong in the west with an eagle perched defiantly atop it. My civic self was galvanized, and this time the students rallied: protests arose, numbers grew, I felt the tingling sensation of a movement beginning, and I had the conflicting emotions of this generational excitement shoring up against the anger and disgust of what it was in reaction to. We marched, we chanted, we made and held signs high. The media heard. The world agreed. London, Sao Paulo, Denver, Seoul, Washington; the world was crying in unison, and it was saying, and we were saying, “No!”

Iraq was invaded.

Did it all mean nothing? Was it really as so fruitless? Was all that disgust that I felt over the cynical apathy of so many others misplaced? Were they right? I foundered. I was struck down by the hydra of Government, Media, and the terrifying never-ending corporate materialism of America. I was struck down by a bolt of the beast’s most powerful weapon – apathy. I watched as what I thought was the greatest of all wills, the will of the people, the will of the WORLD, was shattered by a blunt cudgel of obvious lies and feckless greed.

I was too terrified to plunge myself into the margin of this post-Constitutional world being crafted by a buffoon and a demon. But some cinder of belief, idealism, and hope still smoldered somewhere within me, so rather than sacrificing myself wholly to this beast, I fled. I fled the country in hopes of finding sanctuary in the logical, mature arms of wise Europa. She, riding steadily upon her bull, could show me a path to reconcile my citizen’s heart and the inescapable need to become a consumer. She would show me a path to reconcile my life with my ideals in a world so full of wrongs. My youthful heart was giving way, perhaps Winston Churchill was right; idealism was submitting to reality, liberalism to conservative.

And I did find solace. Not in the embrace of a multilateral forward-looking Europe (ignorance abounds on both sides of the Atlantic), but in the pensive solitude of a life abroad. I comforted by the foresight and brilliance of the American founding fathers, and realized the truly unique place of the United States in the Western tome. There was nothing in this Corporatacracy that Thomas Jefferson had not foreseen, the worship of the dollar that had allowed Americans to give up control of their country to Corporations.

I glowed with the knowledge that Benjamin Franklin would not approve of the Patriot Act. Their words found purchase. They gave me faith, they gave me belief. All was not lost, the great American experiment was at an enormous hurdle, but it was not defunct. Distance gave me a clearer view, so long as someone cared, so long as America continued to thrive with life and intelligence and was not broken beneath the weight of personal and corporate greed, there was hope. So once again, where was my generation? Were they all sitting over laptops in coffee shops reading and writing blogs? Was our voice to be read and not heard?

Years ticked by, friends were shipped off. Then shipped off again. And again. And again. If it was the draft that set the omnipresent baby-boom generation afire then where was Generation Y as so many of us were returned over and again through the newly crafted back-door draft? Were they too concerned about advancing into yuppiedom or finishing their sleeve tattoos? Why oh why were they not clamoring for their brethren dying at the hands of liars who kept us drowning in oil and debt, and kept us fat and stupid? Years ticked by, and that staunch flagpole of fat proud American Patriotism planted in the sands of Iraq began to tilt and sag. The media began to tell Americans that they didn’t believe in their war anymore. Americans said, “Hey! What about us? We are diabetic, bankrupt, and foreclosed upon – help us!” And the years ticked by, and the fool fell from favor.
And the election loomed.

The blue primordial pool frothed and boiled with activity, while the red blurped and bubbled up an old toad to set on their stump, jowled and glaring, a vacant, twittering canary landing on the toad’s shoulder. A blue carpet to the White House had been laid by W, who would jump from it to walk step into the Oval Office? Would we choose a familiar name with a feminine face? Would we choose a familiar look and hearken back to the days of my birth with a smooth and smiling Southerner? Or would we choose the eloquent man from Illinois? Or did it matter? Generation Y would just cruise along as ever, stay the course of apathy, the old names will win – nothing more but that same – running past the same background like an old cartoon.

The primaries began.

The queen stands untouchable at her pulpit, preaching the soothing words of Arkansas. “Come back to us, we’ll clean this up!” the Matron crowed. Aged blue-collars heed, propping her up on their burdened backs. But trouble looms in this burgeoning Camelot of the south. All the money, all the right people, all the plans and calculations of a presidency assured could not have prepared her for what was rumbling at her feet. How could it? Even the source was not prepared! But as she sat upon her pedestal and peered about and forward, she failed to look over Mr. Obama’s shoulder, where the sleepy-eyed, yawning ranks of Generation Y were beginning to fall into step. Somehow the eloquence of Barack had done the impossible; he had pierced the disinterested shield of apathy guarding the youth of America. Generation Y heard him, and they have come to his banner!

It is the last shard of the hope of my youth that Mr. Obama carries with him. And the love and admiration of so many like me. I am not so naïve to believe in the rhetoric of change or to think there will be great upheaval. However, despite all the cynicism of years and disgust, I DO still have hope. And at long last, I feel, and see, that I am not alone. So go forward, Mr. Obama, please, always forward. Although your burden is great, not only in toil but with our hope, go forward Mr. Obama. Give us health care. Continue to show and return dignity to the obese, angry country which we are about to inherit. Ignore the shrill cries of the ignorant and the racist. You bare our flag. Move forward, Mr. Obama, we remain with you; so long as you remain with us.