Serious intra-generational meditations are always in vogue during times of upheaval and chaos, and today is no exception. And frankly, why wouldn’t it be a great time to contemplate the forging of millions of people in the furnaces of the now? Europe is threatening to fly apart like a delaminating high-speed flywheel, protesters are occupying cities all over the world, and the political “leaders” everywhere are finding it hard to speak or act without tripping over their own feet. With unemployment above 9%, that leaves plenty of hours free to think and write and blog about these issues; the ubiquity and non-existent monetary cost of the web makes it easy.
While one can argue that the Baby Boomers have borne the brunt of the recession, the situation for people closer to my age isn’t much better. The latter are still more likely to take to cyberspace to vent their frustrations, and they did, starting with the Millennial Generation. Generation X soon retorted by pointing out to those self-absorbed Millennials that enough is enough. Then, somebody else decided to coin a new phrase, Generation Catalano, for the four-year cohort that didn’t quite fit in with either preceding description. I’ve never been sure where I fit. Unlike the Boomers, Generation X has never had an agreed-upon delineation of who exactly is included, so sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not; on the other hand, I’ve never considered myself to be a Millennial. This is probably why somebody felt the need to step in and create Catalano, named after a short-lived TV series (I heard of it but never watched it; I do, however, vividly remember Claire Danes being prominently displayed on the local TV program guide).
First of all, “Generation Catalano” is a ridiculous name, and even if I technically belong because I was born during the Carter administration, I will never claim that mantle for myself. However, I do agree that there is something different about people my age, different even from people just five years younger or older. This is primarily because of the speed at which things change these days, but earlier events have shaped my life as well.
I grew up remembering the tail end of the Cold War. Nuclear war drills involving sitting under the desk were long gone. People didn’t palpably fear annihilation like they did decades before. Sure, the Soviet Union and the Commies were the “bad guys”, but it was soon to be over and everybody seemed to know it. One of my favorite shows from that time, MacGyver, started off with Communist antagonists but very quickly had to move on; some of the early episodes where the bad guys were the East Germans are pretty laughable now. Once the Cold War ended, there were no epoch-worthy enemies left. We had Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein v1.0, and no matter how many people tried to argue they were the next Hitler, you knew in your heart that they didn’t even believe it themselves. I also heard in church about the terrible things being done to the people in Central America (I was far too young to know what liberation theology was), and even that was tricky because The Gipper said that people like the Contras were on George Washington’s side. In any case, compared to thousands of nuclear missiles streaming over the North Pole towards every city in America with more than 50,000, it was pretty third-rate stuff.
With no real enemies, and more importantly a booming economy, there was nothing that a teenager growing up in the early 90s had to worry about. Do well in school, go to college, and you will be fine. Then, when I went to college in the late 90s, this became even more clear. The dotcom boom was more than just making money on ridiculous ventures. It was a time when nobody really knew what to do with this internet thing, so they tried everything. It was weird, it was full of failures, but it was fun. It was discovering a brand new toy that nobody had ever seen before, and more importantly, before it had been monetized. Of course, people tried to make money, and plenty of people did, but it seemed to simply grow on trees. Nobody was really talking about what has become the key to making money on the internet: collecting personal data for resale. It was about using Napster on a dial-up modem, even though it was a pain in the ass and took forever. It was those silly Geocities webpages that everybody threw up because you could and it was easy.
Then the bubble burst and 9/11 happened. 9/11 wasn’t all that surprising. We did remember that people hated the U.S., and that terrorism existed, so terrorists striking the U.S. wasn’t as shocking as it may have been to people who didn’t remember anything before the first George Bush. What the first few years of the aughts held for me went beyond just 9/11 and the way it morphed from a “let’s everybody get together to punish the Taliban” to “Hey, Saddam Hussein!” It was the loss of confidence in the economy. Not just because of things like Enron and WorldCom, which were certainly important. Even more than that, though was the slump. I can’t think of a better picture that sums up the current economic malaise than this. Everybody focuses on the red, current line, which is truly catastrophic, but it’s important to look at the black and especially the brown lines, those of the 1990 and 2001 slumps respectively. Both of those were much slower to bounce back than previous slumps, but especially the 2001 slump was just a bone-crushing slog, lasting for about 4 years before the job recovery was complete, and growing slowly still after that.
This event, to me, is what separates us from Generation X and the Millennials. We probably didn’t remember much of the 1990 slump, but we were around to see the boom of the late 90s and we were poised to take our place at the trough, and then it was yanked away from us. Since then, it has been a decade of lost chances and stagnation.
I’m just speaking for myself, but this sequence of events has led to a very real frustration with the people in charge. Personally, I lay a lot of the blame for the state we are in at the feet of the decisions made by Congress in the early 2000s time frame, although the narrowing of opportunities for the middle class had started long before then. Viewed from afar and with some measure of hindsight, the late 90s is probably more properly viewed as a brief economic nova that temporarily interrupted a fairly constant downward trajectory, but at the time, it’s understandable as to why it was seen as the harbinger of a whole new way of doing things. It ended up as such, but not exactly in the way in which we had hoped for.
Even if you don’t blame the current economic mess on the Bush administration, though, the frustration is still the same. A frustration acutely felt by those who grew up at a time when peace was at hand and a technological Nirvana was upon us, and all we ended up with was Bernie Ebbers and the constant fear of identity theft.
Too young to remember previous hiccups, however brief, and too old to have lived our entire lives with texting and Wikipedia and blogs central to our lives, the people born when the peanut farmer tilled the South Lawn are in a unique spot.
Oh, and the rest of you generations never had it as bad as us.
(As for the title of this post, this should shed some light, literally).