A Word to Our Younger Generations
A Context
When I talk about the “younger generations”, I’m referring to Millennials, Gen Z and all the subsequent lemmings who fall in love with a life in the theatre. I’m from Generation X, which is largely ignored these days, or called “Boomer”. Boomers are actually our parents’ generation. They’re the generation who were the children of the “Greatest Generation”, of the Great Depression era just post-WWII. When the soldiers came home from World War Two in the late 1940’s, they missed their wives somethin’ fierce. And from that reunification came a whole lot of babies. That’s why it’s called the Baby Boom. That is my parents’ generation. Thus, I’m Gen X. Some of you will already know this, but a lot of people don’t have a context for where the generations came from in time, and it's an important context to have.
When I was a kid in the late ‘70’s into the ‘80’s, we were just past the Vietnam War era. TV shows were Taxi, Barney Miller, Mash, All in the Family… shows that tackled hard issues of family, sexism, racism, and more. These shows largely focused on domestic issues and left world politics to the politicians (with the notable exception of Mash). But they were great about how they discussed these issues. They were honest, direct, and they didn’t pretend to know all the answers. They asked questions of their audiences that were difficult and with a bent toward progress. This was the TV of that day. I highly suggest getting on some nostalgia tv network and watching Barney Miller and Taxi. It will blow your mind what these shows were tackling with such alacrity (brisk and cheery enthusiasm).
Because cable TV was in its infancy during my childhood, I got the best of all worlds. I got to see the shows of my youth at the time they were airing: A-Team, Knight Rider, McGiver, Magnum PI, Family Ties, The Facts of Life, Growing Pains, Three’s Company, etc... and all the shows that came before me, in the first rounds of reruns. The shows of my youth were already veering away from substantive justice toward straight entertainment products. Some were still looking at issues of family health, but now they began to take on a kind of fluffiness that would protect all sponsors equally. It wasn’t as bad as it is now, but as the Ronald Reagan years took hold, a distinct change in our cultural willingness to look at ourselves was pivoting us away from self-awareness and toward a culture of consumption. Needless to say, this hurt our arts communities deeply. This is when advertising truly took over our airwaves and we as audience members became the product. The shows were now simply vehicles to deliver us to the companies selling laundry soap.
For a little more mind-blowing context, I didn’t have my first cell phone until after I was out of college. When I was in college in the 1990’s there was no internet. My junior year I was given an “email” address for the intranet which was the university web server. It ended in .exe.
The younger generations have been born and raised with this consumption culture from day one. I can see that it would be very challenging for them to know what to talk about when it’s time to activate and make change. You work with what you know, and the incredibly important progress of the MeToo, LGBTQ+ and BLM movements has created a momentum for our younger generations to grab onto. I love this so much. At the same time, there is a lack of nuts-and-bolts awareness of things past, movements that came before, the reasons for these movements, and how effective change can be made without reinventing the wheel. And so we who identify as liberal or progressive are stuck in the Rhetorical Justice model that I outlined above. It may be hard to wrap our minds around getting away from a lexical dogma as the way to institute change, but it’s really important that we learn the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk.
I notice a lot of Gen X’ers like myself, and Boomers, talking trash about our young people these days. I’ve been guilty of it, too. I admit that. I’ve seen a lot of what I refer to as a lack of interest in hard work. It’s called “work ethic”, and I’ve bitched about Millennials and Gen Z’ers having none of it. I’ve noticed a willingness to bail on booked commitments, and a seeming lack of concern for the wasting of other people’s time or money.
But I think I get it, too. I think our younger citizens are seeing our society implode and they understand something that we don’t yet: The US is on its way out. Why waste 40 hours a week for a crappy wage at a stuntingly dull occupation? They’d rather live at home until 30, start a tik tok empire, or couch surf than kill their soul in an office with a half-hour lunch break. (I feel the same way, and always have. I became a Realtor as my backup occupation and it works great for me because I don’t have office hours or a desk I’m mandated to sit at for constant hours.)
When my parents’ generation was out in the streets protesting the Vietnam War, they knew that when they were done with that exercise in what we’ve now jadedly come to realize as a futile one, there would be a steady, 9-5 job waiting for them back home. They could be anything: an accountant, an engineer, an artist, a teacher… When I came of age in the early 1990’s, that possibility had all but dried up. I saw, sarcastically, the opportunity to work somewhere twenty years just to be laid off or fired right before I could collect benefits. It was already a different landscape.
Imagine how seniors must be feeling right now about all of this wokeness. It must be hard to have been raised in a world where if you had a job, you could have a car and a house (if you were white). It must be hard to have a certain way of talking about things, and all of a sudden you’re told you are wrong, that’s the wrong word or the wrong way to think. It must be very difficult to be an ally of marginalized communities, having been on the streets with your brothers and sisters protesting the most evil war in the history of our country (as of then), or in the civil rights struggles of the late sixties, only to have the younger generations tell you that you’re the problem; that you need to instantly fix all of the cultural problems that exist in our society. That your age, your color, your economic status are all proof that you are endemically a sinner in need of repent (Wait a minute! Am I in church again?). That you need to shut up and take the firehose of complaints from everyone who has ever been wronged in our society, and commit social hara kiri this instant.
That’s what our current cultural landscape looks like to the older generations. We need more listening and compassion across the board.
No comments:
Post a Comment