Twenty-nothings

Like a man without a country, I am a man without a generation. Well actually, I do have a generation, but we do not fit into a generation worth naming. The "Generation X" people were born before 1978 and the "Generation Y" people were born after 1982. This leaves a four year gap covering people who are in their mid to late 20's, all without a generation to call their own.

We are a sub-generation. We were born as the Carter era was ending and the Regan era was beginning. We grew up watching every space shuttle launch. We were carted around in full size station wagons. We saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. But without the benefit of knowing much more about Communists than could be gleaned from James Bond movies, we didn’t know why it was so important. We had the first hand-me-down cars with airbags, and only the cool kids knew how to drive stick. We watched the O.J. Simpson trial and wondered why the funny guy from "The Naked Gun" movies would do such a thing.

Some people call us the MTV generation. That is a bit closer to the truth. MTV was able to cross-promote in a way never before dreamed of. In our formative years the basic format of music broadcast changed from AM music stations to FM, then to television. By the time we were knee deep in New Kids on the Block and Simpsons merchandise, music had gone from analog to digital. I remember buying my first single: it was "The Ghostbusters Theme" by Ray Parker Jr. on 45. My first CD was the "Wayne’s World" soundtrack. I immediately copied it to tape so I could listen to it on my Walkman.

Most generations have their own defining moment. The defining moment for this generation is hard to define, perhaps we lack one altogether. People just a few years our senior mourned the death of Kurt Cobain. You might say he was their Buddy Holly. I remember hearing about it on the junior high school bus. Cobain was the guy on a few of the stoner students’ tee-shirts (in high school they wore Sid Barrett). It wasn’t a big deal for my generation, and it certainly wasn’t the day the music died. Two weeks later Nixon died, and I think it had just about the same effect on my generation.

After that, not much else happened of any great importance for our generation. This was the Clinton era, and our lives seemed to be on auto-pilot. We didn’t have a war to protest. There was, of course, Bosnia, but none of us (and few of our parents) knew or cared about theramifications of this geopolitical double-cross.

There was one cultural event which attempted to replicate a defining moment for a previous generation. That was Woodstock ‘94. These three days of peace & love were brought to you by Pepsi and Viacom. My generation watched this at home on the MTV. The failure of this as a defining moment stems from the fact that there were many other large scale concerts going on at the same time as Woodstock ‘94. The only difference was that this concert was held in a field in New York where, 25 years earlier and two counties away, the first Woodstock had been. Sure, Joe Cocker was there, but he was still covering The Beatles, Traffic, and The Box Tops.

Y2K. This was to be our defining moment. The stock market was going to crash. Every computer, graphing calculator, and programable oven was going to explode. Planes would fall from the sky as if the atmosphere could no longer support air travel. Massive blackouts would bring society, as we knew it, to its knees. Were we ready? You bet. We topped off our gas tanks and withdrew the $15 left in our savings accounts. And with a flashlight and two cans of Spaghetti-o’s, we said, "Bring it on."

When nothing happened, we didn’t breath a sigh of relief. Instead, our sense of invincibility was slightly enhanced. There was a little disappointment in the fact that we had been sold a bill of goods. Y2K. It was perfect. It was the millennium, not the doomsday Christian millennium, but a real one with an acronym and everything. On January 1, 2000, we put the Spaghetti-o’s back in the kitchen cabinet and deposited the $15 back in our savings accounts to help pay the credit card bill from last night’s end of the world party.

The year 2000 offered us another chance for definition in the Presidential Election. This was the first time we were able to vote: a benefaction from our parent’s generation in Amendment XXVI to the Constitution. Not that we used it. Despite the best efforts of our MTV to "Rock the Vote" (whatever the hell that means), the great majority of us stayed in, slept in, or just went about the day as usual.

For most of us this was an election between the lame Vice-President and that one President’s son. For the informed lot of us, it was a vote against Tipper Gore and her fascist censorship campaign, or a vote against another mean Republican who would cut government subvention of the arts and re-institute slavery. In any case we watched the results day in and day out, wishing that we could have been the deciding vote. I vowed that I would never again vote for a man just because I believed he was the lesser of two evils (which I did again in 2004).

In the end we lost another possible cause for our generation. Bush became the President and did his thing as expected, and we all went back to working at Applebee’s, also as expected (we were scheduled for the rush shift).

Then there was September 11. This was the day that changed everything (unlike the Toyota Tacoma, "the truck that changed everything"). For our generation, it proved that we were in fact not invincible, at least in lower Manhattan we weren’t. For some of us it revived a patriotic pledge that we had taken during our formative years in grade school. As most of America was glued to 24-hour news networks, some of us began to form actual opinions on the world outside. This was the first time that some of us would utter the phrase Fucking Arabs, or Goddam Muslims. The economic "downturn" that followed gave a number of us a good reason to file for unemployment, and some a reason to not look for work at all. Nothing that followed gave us anything to call our own. We didn’t rise to the call of a greater cause. We just sat there and watched the images of a changing world flash past us.

Since then there has been the Iraq war. Some of us who signed eight year contracts with the military have had to pay the piper. Some of us have found the time to protest the war in some form or another. The majority have just gone about paying into a Social Security system we believe will be defunct before we can benefit from it. Mostly we pay into a system that provides us fresh entertainment for the least amount of realized cost. The MTV had long since lost its luster.

In looking for a defining moment for my generation, I’m left at a loss. Maybe it just hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will. Perhaps we can go through the rest of our lives as fortune’s step-children, inheriting nothing, and passing on a legacy not worth inviting to Easter brunch with Grandma.

Let’s face it, I’m a member of a group that has no generation: a group that is mostly middle-class, college-educated, unskilled, underemployed, restless, ignorant, and drunk. The morally repressed youth of today has no purpose but to consume. This period in life was not intended to be stagnant. There is no great war; there is no vast frontier. All we have are the electronic images burnt into the back of our eyes. Society calls us twenty-somethings. When I look out, all I see are twenty-nothings.