There are more than a few of your generation suffering from arrested adolescence. You have my deepest sympathy.
Maybe Hee Haw will make a comeback?
You picked MY lil ole post out of all the ones that disagree with you, to insult me? I didn't say anything rude to you, all I did was disagree. Go pick on somebody else, OC. I'm not impressed.
Your generations slogan is "gimmie, gimmie, gimmie."
"For evidence of this emerging generation gap, take a look at a Fortune magazine survey earlier this year asking employed twentysomethings if they would ever "like to be like" Baby Boomers. Four out of five say no. Peruse recent surveys asking college students what they think of various Boomer-sanctioned moral crusades--everything from "family values" to the "New Age movement." By overwhelming margins, they either disapprove or are remarkably indifferent. Recall the furious Thirteener-penned responses that appeared just after the media's celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock, or after the recent turn away from yuppie-style consumption ("Let the self-satisfied, self-appointed, selfrighteous baby-boomers be the first to practice the new austerity they have been preaching of late," Mark Featherman announced in a New York Times essay titled "The 80's Party Is Over")."
"Remember, these are the young people who cast their first votes during the 1980s, for the party (Republican) and the generation (of Reagan and Bush) that Boomers at like age loved to excoriate. More recently the end of the Cold War and the "Bush recession" have persuaded Thirteeners to go along with an all-Boomer Democratic ticket. But fortysomething politicians can hardly rest easy. This latest turn in what Coupland calls the "microallegiances" of today's young people also reflects a toxic reaction to what Boomers have done to the other party (even right-wing Thirteeners shuddered to hear the Quayle and Quayle "values" preaching) and a vehement backlash against the status quo (pre-election opinion polls showed Ross Perot's strongest support coming from under-thirty voters). Whatever economic and cultural alienation Thirteeners feel over the next decade--and they will feel plenty--will inevitably get translated into hostility toward the new generation in power."
"If being a resented older generation is a novel experience for Boomers, and if life on the short end feels ruinous to Thirteeners, each group can take a measure of solace in the repeating generational rhythms of American history. About every eighty or ninety years America has experienced this kind of generation gap between selfrighteous neopuritans entering midlife and nomadic survivalists just coming of age."
"In them lies much of the doubt, distress, and endangered dream of late-twentieth-century America. As a group they aren't what older people ever wanted but rather what they themselves know they need to be: pragmatic, quick, sharp-eyed, able to step outside themselves and understand how the world really works. From the Thirteener vantage point, America's greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again. Others don't yet see it, but today's young people are beginning to realize that their upbringing has endowed them with a street sense and pragmatism their eiders lack. Many admit they are a bad generation-but so, too, do they suspect that they are a necessary generation for a society in dire need of survival lessons.. "
"When they look into the future, they see a much bleaker vision than any of today's older generations ever saw in their own youth. Polls show that Thirteeners believe it will be much harder for them to get ahead than it was for their parents--and that they are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the long-term fate of their generation and nation. They sense that they're the clean-up crew, that their role in history will be sacrificial--that whatever comeuppance America has to face, they'll bear more than their share of the burden. It's a new twist, and not a happy one, on the American Dream."
"Trace the life cycle to date of Americans born in 1961. They were among the first babies people took pills not to have. During the 1967 Summer of Love they were the kindergartners who paid the price for America's new divorce epidemic. In 1970 they were fourth-graders trying to learn arithmetic amid the chaos of open classrooms and New Math curricula. In 1973 they were the bell-bottomed sixth-graders who got their first real-life civics lesson watching the Watergate hearings on TV. Through the late 1970s they were the teenage mail-hoppers who spawned the Valley Girls and other flagrantly nonBoomer youth trends. In 1979 they were the graduating seniors of Carter-era malaise who registered record-low SAT scores and record-high crime and drug-abuse rates."
"But for Thirteeners just growing up, the 1970s meant something very different: an adult world that expressed moral ambivalence where children sought clear answers, that expected children to cope with real-world problems, that hesitated to impose structure on children's behavior, and that demonstrated an amazing (even stupefying) tolerance for the rising torrent of pathology and negativism that engulfed children's daily life."
Yes, we are coarse. We swear and have very earthy humor. But the survival of this Nation depends on what we, as a generation, do over the next two decades. We've not the suave, West Point Lt who got all A's and looks great in shiny shoes. We're the battle hardened sgt who's survived it all and who knows the score. Don't let the cigar and the harsh language fool you. It's only just begun.