I have to say that I found it more troubling than anything else. It's a well-written blog. Very poetic, in a way. Very clever. But...at the bottom of it all, I think I disagree with it. Here's a bit of it:
"I was born in the 1979-1983 generation gap—a few years short of X, a few years ahead of Millennials. We’re a generation defined by disaster: Columbine, 9/11. We came of age at the peak of the War on Terror, came into the job market just in time to lose everything in the crash.
We stayed up past our bedtimes to watch the Berlin Wall come down, and the fall of the Soviet Union. We spent elementary school learning and re-learning geography. Generation Change.
[...]
We never had air-raid drills, because we were born into a world that understood there was no real point to them. Generation Mortality.
We are not the Lost Generation. No great war stripped us of our innocence in a deafening blast; instead, it was eaten away layer by layer in a sandstorm of small atrocities that scattered us as they wore us away. Our apocalypse is one of inexorable decay, not sudden catastrophe. Generation Entropy.
[...]
We were the last generation to be told repeatedly that no one would hire us with purple hair and nose rings.
Financially, we’re closer to the Millennials than Gen X. We can’t afford to wait for glamorously nonspecific media jobs. We grew up in the shadow of the dot-com boom and bust: close enough to the eye of the storm to know that we are unlikely to have nice things.
We were the first generation in nearly a century to enter a workforce defined by underemployment and defanged unions. By and large, we don’t know what it feels like to go to work with the power of collective bargaining at our backs.
We’ve seen just enough of the other side to know what we’re missing.
Our American Dream isn’t a house in the suburbs. It’s being able to afford to go to the doctor when we get sick. It’s not getting ahead so much as finally maybe breaking even.
We’re a generation of reluctant entrepreneurs, empowered to make the leap to creative careers and self-employment largely because our “real" jobs have left us with so little to lose. We know better than to trust anyone else to provide us with stability."
How depressing is that? How very self-pitying? I sort of wanted to just respond to the person who sent this to me with a short "Shit happens, man." response. I can't argue with the truth of the blogger. I'm sure lots of people (clearly, friends of mine) agree with the writer. It makes me sort of disappointed in them, though. Maybe I'm too optimistic, or naive, or whatever. But, its too easy to be so cynical and self-pitying. What a cop out. Yes, we grew up in a time when things have been sort of rough, but (I've said this before, I think) it makes you a stronger person. All of the examples that this blogger uses seem to boil down to 'nothing stays the same' mixed with a little 'expect the worst'. It's an entire group of people just waiting for the other shoe to drop. How lame. What about a group of people who deal well with a changing world? Who learned tolerance at an early age? Who grew up watching Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street and singing along with them about the alphabet and 'won't you be my neighbor'? Who don't look twice at people of different races or hearing different languages because we've been around that our entire lives? Who see the beauty in diversity instead of feeling threatened by it? Who don't tell their kids 'you won't get a job with purple hair and a nose ring'? Who, yes, have seen evil, but who have also seen the wonder and beauty of people flying across oceans in a hot air balloon, baseball figures turning back flips in the infield (Yeah, Ozzie Smith!), grew up knowing a woman could become Secretary of State for the United States, saw the Hubble space telescope launched into space, saw Nelson Mandela finally freed after nearly three decades, saw the Million Man March, watched the world change on a personal level when our own families got computers and the amazement of having the world at our fingertips, we saw them build a road under the English Channel (I have always found this particularly fascinating...). We grew up in an amazing time, that doesn't have to be defined by school shootings, wars on terror, and doping in sports. I'm not saying ignore the rough stuff; I'm saying stop ignoring the good stuff. I don't want to be included in a group that paints itself as down-on-their-luck and to-be-pitied. And, again, I'm not technically part of this blogger's view of Generation Nothing, but I'm close enough that it bothers me that there are apparently a lot of people who do feel like they are Nothing. Can't you remember Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers? Big Bird and Mr. Rogers would be so disappointed in you right now.
"“When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.” --Fred Rogers
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