My Generation

When my generation was coming of age in about 1976 to 1980, we must have known instinctively our development was taking place underneath the shadow of those who matured a decade earlier, and their stunning political and cultural accomplishment. We sensed, from the legends transmitted by the likes of the Beatles, Stones, Dylan...
that we were unavoidably cast in the role of historical intermediaries, firmly and yet ambiguously set adrift in a period smack dab between the protective anonymity of earlier rebellious masses and the deliberate identification of subsequent aspiring up and comers. Our historical destiny was veiled by a haze of cool-posturing drug consumption and teeter-tottering uncertainties. We moved about recklessly in our premature abandon, thrashing for meaning. Trying to impress, but feeling extremely empty, dangerously aware that we lacked the tools required to reach goals that only true discipline would enable, crawling through the violent social debris left over from confrontations whose shocking reverberations still had residual stunning power, and desperately willful with the need to strike a nonchalant air. To this day, as a generation, we have demonstrated a retrospectively surprising collective inability to define what our strongest moment stood for. We have either straggled along vaguely upon the temporal coat-tails of the sixties folk, or tried to squeeze in on the "Hip to be Square" mentality that emerged about 1984.

Maybe more than all that, we finally located our worthwhile voices as the internet age dawned, but in doing so ended up realizing that the prior freedom of expression had become so curtailed, such a terminally limiting cultural cul de sac, an irreconcilable impediment to our finest potential legacy. And now, marooned here, in an America that has removed all traces of once-sanctioned rich psycho-graffiti, we're stuck in a time-frame whose most salient aspiration involves the dull wish for material stability. But there's no colour, no pizazz, no originality and no life as it should be properly understood. I don't think New York City should ban smoking cigarette smoking in Public Parks, that's going WAY too far.
We've reached the stage of de-facto absolute docility, masked by a rigid and drab disguise, the charade of them doing it all "for our own sake," the apparent end of the line for all imaginative rambunctiousness, the complete and utter disregard for what keeps the stymied spirit going. In allowing them to define us against us, we've hunkered down in the Fallout Shelter of self-war, the cage that contained our former dreams, but now holds not even those. A public "good" is ascribed to the degree to which we love our invisible prison walls, and even the money that fueled the boom years has evaporated, leaving us only a hollowness that had to be felt (NOW) before one could credit its actual existence.