Recently, I've been watching the headlines coming out of the 'late night war' between NBC, Leno, and O'Brian, and I've been thinking about what the motivating factors would be for people to come out in such support of Conan O'Brian. What is behind the "I'm with Coco" campaign*, the waiting outside ticket offices in tents in the rain-- a living situation that, at one time, only refugees of wars and financial collapse enjoyed-- just to buy tickets to the filming of a television show.
We are a generation that has never felt much need**. The excesses of the 80's and the general wealth in comparison to much the rest of the world has left us 'fine, fat, and sassy,' as my grandfather used to say. We are the grandchildren of the world war generations. Our grandparents were reduced to poverty in the depression and fought alongside the Brits, the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Russians to help liberate Asia and Europe. Our parents grew up in the homes of those fathers, military men many were, and those mothers who had experienced what it was to work in a factory and came back home to be housewives once more, joy and regrets often buried.
We are the children of a torn generation, half of whom thought to catch a man through the formula of "show him that you care just for him; do the things he likes to do; wear your hair just for him..." thus accepting a life of 2nd place to the man of the house (or of being the man of the house); and half of whom rebelled against the social norms, burned their bras, and gave (and received) 'free love' in myriad forms. There were the men who learned to say 'yes sir' and obey, unquestioningly, though many were devious behind their fathers' backs; and there were the ones who said "**** you, Dad!" and left the house, sometimes never to return.
We are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the generation that built this country. The workers who assembled the roads, bridges, dams, and buildings that were key elements to FDR's recovery plan. They were the engineers who designed and created; they were the great men and women who dragged America up by its bootstraps and took it, very literally, to the moon. Their hardships taught them that with hard work and discipline (emphasis on the hard work and the discipline) you could succeed. But their hardships also taught them that there was little room in this life for frivolity-- for art, perhaps, or dance (e.g. ballet), or perhaps simply for things they didn't understand. So when so many children of that boom and beyond generation rebelled, went on journeys to 'find themselves,' became artists, or dove into drugs, those parents perhaps did not know what to do with themselves. That military mindset that had worked for so long-- the only thing many of them knew-- backfired, their kid went haywire, and there was nothing to be done.
Rising up out of the remains of the Viêtnam war, the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F Kennedy, and the sexual revolution came the diverse, fractured, broken generation that somehow congealed in a willingness to press on and push forward, with more than a few left behind. While some of them 'got a crew cut' and a 'real job,' others never really came down off the high. They passed their opinions on to children who often either tacitly agreed or rebelliously (spitefully?) did not. They suffered the aftereffects of a period of time spent on drugs or under an oppressive roof. They believed or refused to believe that all you needed was hard work to succeed. As many of them looked around, they realized (or perhaps subconsciously were aware) that much of the hard work had been completed for them. The Empire State Building was built; it just needed people to fill it. The Golden Gate Bridge was complete; it just needed people to cross it. And so this generation set about filling the buildings and positions provided. They built computers, watched the build-up to the Cold War, marveled at what Americans were capable of, and perhaps thought back to the question "What can /you/ do for your country?" They made things better for their children, and isn't that the point anyway?
And so here we are, the children of the boom. There are those out there who call us Generation Y, though I greatly prefer the 'Echo Boom.' Both make us sound like followers, but one makes us sound louder and more effective, at least to my ears.
We are the children who have been removed from hardship through the hard work and discipline of generations before us. We have our grandparents and great-grandparents-- the people (and yes, they were young enough once for this) who built this country with blood, sweat, tears, and toil. We have the generations of men and women who sought something better, left their homeland, and came to America, many of them with but a few bits of money and food in their pockets. We have immigrants who did not only survive but held their heads high as they were released from slavery farming cotton and building railroads, and do not be fooled... there were more slaves out there than only the African ones, and we would do well to recognize them all. Our generation has largely been able to stay home, never having experienced a draft or a war quite like Viêtnam, Korea, or World War I/II. (We play video games about it instead, learning to make light or at least being desensitized in the process.) Tragedies have struck us-- we know where we were for 9/11, many for Columbine, many for Virginia Tech-- but they have been distant and removed. We cannot understand what we have not experienced ourselves. While we have sat and listened to the stories of granddad's buddies being shot down and saved by Chinese fishermen (that one was in my granddad's repertoire), we cannot understand the relief in hearing they're safe, they're coming home, and they owe their lives to kind strangers. We have heard the stories, but we cannot relate. So when real tragedy hits-- the tsunami of 2004, Darfur, the taking of the Swat Valley, riots, grief, heartache-- we cannot grasp it, and when 'fake tragedy' hits-- our favorite star loses his job-- we do not (we choose not to?) differentiate.
What is to be done with my generation? Has our lack of suffering, of knowing true hardship, made us soft, weak, ineffectual? Worse yet, has our lack of experience dealing with real hardships made us unable to relate to those who have? There are those among us who have been there-- who have experienced bombings; who have seen friends die; who have known the pain of someone disappearing without a trace. But can we understand them?
Can we relate? Or do we 'support' a cause with only a picture or with a phrase on Twitter, be it Conan, Haiti, religion, or education.
What are we doing, Echo Boom? I ask this with neither exasperation nor disgust, but I do ask it truthfully. What are we doing? And where are we heading?
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"The Ken Burns documentary 'The Late Night War' " (a 'mockumentary' from one of the late-night shows)
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1956208_1956202_1956129,00.html
*Understand here that I am making no judgement calls about campaigning for what you feel or believe in. If you feel it is important to campaign for Conan O'Brian, then you should do it. We don't always understand why other people feel compelled to do what they do-- our differences of opinion do not always point out correct/incorrect. Sometimes they are simply differences and little to nothing more. So don't take it personally. I don't really understand running... not my thing; but Eric Liddell would probably have understood all you runners out there.
**This post makes sweeping claims about generations, without caveat. I recognize that I cannot account for everyone, that there are things said here that don't apply to you. I can't help it. Yes, every individual is important, but every individual is still a member of a group, and the fact is, when a group is a large as a generation, some of the fine details of your life may get lost in the generalizations. Don't take is personally; it's true of everyone, not just you. If something I say isn't true of you, that's fine. I recognize you are unique-- orange in a sea of blue. But I can't fill this post with caveats. I'd never finish writing it.
