I am not a target market. I don't appreciate being marginalized and called a member of the apathetic Generation X who simply don't care about anything. I am not goal-less. I don't exactly know where my future is headed, but that is one of the perks of being young, I don't have to know. Life is a journey, not a destination. I don't need to map it out, marking the route to job, family, and retirement so that I get there on time.
"Generation X" comes from the novel by Douglas Coupland (which was pretty good), about three twentysomething people living in Palm Springs and escaping the rest of the world. It has become the catch phrase used to label those of us born from '63 to '73. Yet the people responsible for bringing the term into mainstream dialogue were not from literary or sociological fields, but from the marketing and advertising industries. In their efforts to categorize and size up a rising market of consumers, they gave us a label and tried to figure out ways to taunt and tempt us into buying whatever it is that they are selling.
I guess the marketing yuppies who decided to use the term Generation X did not really get the book. They took it at face value in their rush to work, sell and keep up the image. I found it amusing and laughed at how some of the characters spoke my own cynical thoughts on the depressing state of the world and expressed similar frustration in thinking about how we are going to fix it up.
The yuppies saw this cynicism and decided we're apathetic and lack their activist spirit of the sixties. Maybe we do lack that spirit, but it really pisses me off when some marketing money-grubber calls me and my generation apathetic.
Yes, I have feelings. Yes, I care about the events taking place around me. Just because I'm not airing them across a megaphone or marching in a herd of tie-dyes up to the White House does not mean that I am just sitting back and giving up. No thanks, that wouldn't be apathetic, it would be just plain pathetic.
So what am I doing, they ask. Well, it is not that easy. If I think about it too much I'll get depressed and feel like there is nothing I can do. They say we are lazy, we don't want to work hard, we don't have the drive. We are aware of their monetary endeavors and their sales pitches, but look what it got them. Huge car and house payments that not only drive them to work insane hours, but seem to simply drive them insane and to the therapist.
Well, we shove it in their faces and laugh at them. We are not a homogenous group of indecisive twentysomethings. Many of us grew up with the TV on, mom at work and dad busy focusing on a new family. We had to deal with reality sooner than the baby boomers. Our childhoods were not so full of innocence. We had troubles to deal with at a young age. Those of us who were not victims of divorce had best friends, boyfriends or girlfriends who had to deal with divorce. It is not such a free and easy childhood when you are 10 years old and have to negotiate money issues with grown adults just so you can go to summer camp. And it doesn't end there: who pays for college?
So don't think we are lazy or indecisive or apathetic, we have just been dealing with this crap for a while and would like to not deal for a while. We might have been born what they consider yesterday, but we have been conscious ever since. We are not so easily fooled. We are not going to buy into your beauty myth or your keeping up with the Jones' mentality. We might be selfish for a while, but it is not a gluttonous, "I want this" kind of selfish. It is more like a period of return to ourselves. Focusing on our individual needs, finding our goals, trying to reawaken our dreams. We need to heal and rebuild ourselves before we can go out and save the world.
But there are little things we can do along the way, and I believe that it is the little things count. Small, random acts of kindness committed by large numbers of people - a kind of individual activism, which might not appease those who were twentysomething in the excessive eighties, but makes me feel good. Smiling at someone who looks lost. Walking a couple of extra feet to make sure garbage gets in the can. Treating people with respect, not just people who have respectable annual incomes or degrees from high universities, but respecting the cashier at the luncheonette or the bagboy at the supermarket. These seem like small things, but each act not only energizes the receiver, but also the doer and enables that person to do again. Each time that person does something nice for another, it becomes easier to do bigger things.
Our generation has a lot of self-healing to do. We need to heal the wounds of divorce, drugs and the fear of AIDS and intimacy. If each day we work to heal ourselves and each other through small but significant acts, we will be able to think through the problems that face us - racism, sexism, class inequity, education, drugs, the environment, AIDS, the homeless, the list just goes on and on. Once we think about these things, we will talk about them, and then eventually, when we are strong and whole, we shall do something about them.
