Generation Y

We’re the spoiled brats of conservatized hippies, the pampered pets of ex-boho babes. We’re bored, terribly cynical, jaded at eleven. We’re grown up as we learn how to toddle; we’re absolutely ancient at twenty-five. It’s us, so sarcastic, users of the plastic, credit card bills high as we leave grade school behind.

We’re Generation Y, the hippies’ progeny, grandkids of returning war heroes; born oh-so-lucky, pampered to perfection, world-weary after blowing out ten candles. We want more––excitement, danger, thrills––and we’ll sell our souls for a sliver of adventure, or a drop of delight.

Generation Y––as in why do we chase the exhilaration of intoxication? As in why are we bored with life after eighteen? As in why haven’t we inherited the morals of our parents’ parents’ generation?

Our parents, those offbeat iconoclasts, rebelled against grandpa’s morality by smoking weed, dropping acid and making love at Woodstock. World War II veterans, who commanded respect, raised them, and the Baby Boomers loathed that rigid system. They left those straitjackets, their homes at eighteen, and swore to bring up their children––us, Generation Y––differently.

And so they have. Mom and Dad today command no parental respect. No, they want to be their children’s friends. Deathly afraid are they, that their kids will close off communication and be unwilling to talk, if they impose the limits of authority.

That worked, I suppose, as cries of “Mom! Dad!” have vanished from households and lazy drawls of their first names drift like tendrils of smoke. So the aging Baby Boomers’ kids are their teenage friends, but we have all paid the price. In our refusal to recognize natural parental power, we deprive our elders of the stature they must have for us to learn their better ways.

As the Boomers’ strove to emancipate women, the stay-at-home mother disappeared. As their moms attended to their careers, their children, undirected, bored, aimless, stare at screens––TV, computer, X-Box––learning the excitement of violence, minimal clothing, and the lesson that dropping out of high school is no bar to fame and fortune, if their morals are slight and their bodies are toned. Their ideals Paris Hilton and Britney Spears––vacant starlets with nothing to say and money to spend, creations of clever corporate marketing campaigns.

If life is a game, we’re prepared to lose it all, in exchange for thrills with no obligations. Zipping down the road of life at breakneck speed, we’ll soon dead-end, and crash the car before the big four-oh.

Live life at full throttle and enjoy it all, we cry, because we’ll die before our parents do. Whether we OD on coke or let lung cancer kill us, it all points the same way––to a generation’s without faith or hope.

That’s the dark side, to be sure, but there’s also the other. Generation Y fought globalization in Seattle and Quebec City, campaigns against the poison of our parents’ SUVs, cries out, appalled, against corporate culture and Bush’s imperialism. Like the flower children before us, we embrace the ideal of peace, love and understanding, and are determined to help build it. We counter Britney and Paris with the likes of Craig Keilburger, who founded Free the Children, the organization that works to liberate child slaves.

Like every other generation, then, in us two opposing forces contend––selfish materialism and spiritual altruism, the eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil.

You know, I think there’s hope after all.