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Generation
X(XX)
February 20, 2003
By Stephen Sacco
It always starts with these three words: "In the Sixties."
Chances are if you're a member of a generation dubbed Gen
X, which I suppose means you're in your late twenties or thirtysomething,
at least one person told you that young people in the Sixties
were less apathetic than your no-good generation.
The sixties were cool. You are not. They protested. You didn't.
They cared about social injustice. You don't.
Some looked to the right (the children of the Reagan Revolution)
for comfort only to find that your generation was full of
slackers who had succumb to moral relativism and "the liberal
values" of the sixties.
Clearly we had the worst of both worlds. We were hedonist,
only interested in sex and drinking with no social conscious
or moral compass. Evidently, other generations of college
students had little or no interest in sex and drinking. Who
knew?
Why, when we start categorizing generations and ascribing
to them various characteristics, are we invariably blathering
on about "college students"? One reason is that those who
blather are themselves card carrying members of the Starbucks-latte-drinking,
degree-having crowd and they like blathering about themselves,
if even critically, because, of course, present company is
excepted.
Those who go on to military service or a job aren't as prone
to being turned into ping pong balls to volley across the
table in hopes of scoring points in a supposed culture war.
(Nobody's keeping score in this conflict anyway, the point
is to have sides to choose, that would be impossible if someone
were to win.)
When it comes to actual, as opposed to cultural war, we almost
never put the Grande-decafe-latte-with-skim-mild herd on the
front lines. I mean, you could get hurt. Woody Guthrie said
that some men rob you with a gun and some men rob you with
a fountain pen. Apparently some men go to war with a gun and
others get tax cuts.
Who am I to talk? The only time I served in uniform was when
I worked at a fast food restaurant in high school.
My experience of the Gulf War was watching a green screen
on CNN. It lit up in certain areas at times and that meant
we were winning. Then I'd go to class.
It had all the visceral impact of the first generation of
video-game tennis. "I remember," I caught myself saying to
my friend's 16-year-old sister, "when you tried to move the
little stick up or down so you could send the dot across the
screen." She looked at me like I was old.
Who's going to the front lines in Iraq? Traditionally there
are two groups that lopsidedly get sent to the front lines:
minorities and poor rural whites. A war in Iraq is going to
have a front line, unlike Bosnia and Kosovo and much of the
Gulf War, which were fought from the air.
I think about that and any envy I had for the Sixties is
gone. I'm skeptical about defining people as members of a
certain generation, but there are events that hit people in
their guts and shape them and their contemporaries - the Kennedy
assassination, the events of 9/11.
Art also hits us in our guts, or at least should.
Reality TV, which is anything but real, serves to reassure
us that we are smarter than those dumped or duped on "Joe
Millionaire." Art makes us realize the universal nature of
our suffering and folly.
The United Nations has put a blue curtain up around Picasso's
Guernica, a painting that depicts the fascist bombing in the
Spanish town of Guernica. It was deemed an inappropriate backdrop
for a discussion of using force in Iraq. So, like pornography
it must be covered up.
Laura Bush was to host a poetry reading at the White House
but it was cancelled, because the poets might be against the
war or worse, read poetry depicting war's horrors.
Poets and painters are being asked to depart with their X-rated
trash that belongs nowhere near our consideration of war,
lest our leaders blush.
Whether you support a war in Iraq or not, I doubt the way
to support our troops is to disassociate ourselves from the
sacrifice we ask of them. Patriotism does not consist of how
enthusiastically one puts others in harm's way.
If conflict is not averted, let's hope that our sons and
daughters, brothers and husbands come home. When they come
home, with scars and stories and pain, let's hope we don't
have to cover them up, lest our leaders blush.
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