A Generation of Leaves

A generation of men is like a generation of leaves;
the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground,
while others the burgeoning wood brings forth –
and the season of spring comes on.
—Homer, The Iliad

What is my generation? Am I X or Y this week? Or some other geometric determination of my identity—Z or X² or Triangle ABD, perhaps? In what sleek, A-line, postmodern fashion can I declare myself disaffected, disconnected, and dismissed? Is there a T-shirt I can buy? A brand of eyeliner named for my particular age group—Carter Kid Charcoal? Chernobyl Chartreuse? Is there a lapel pin I can wear which will mark me as one of the inner demographic circle? What defines my generation is the extent to which I can say I am not a part of it, I am above it, or better still, below it—sub-cultural, subverting the dominant paradigm, subtracted from the whole. Yet to be subducted this way, driven under the tectonic action of kultur to the point that I phrasify in German rather than down-home, patriotic English, is to be quintessentially part of my generation, a generation of outsiders, glorifying the edge because we cannot bear to be part of the center.

I am twenty-five years old. I was born in 1979, the year the reactor at Three-Mile Island foreshadowed Chernobyl, the year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the year the Seattle Supersonics won the championship. One year before Lennon was shot, before Reagan was elected, seven years before the Challenger explosion, twelve years before the fall of the USSR. And generational discussions usually boil down to this—locating my place in the world via listing of major events communally remembered. Oh, yes, we all love the 80s, don't we? Pong and Rubix Cubes and Hungry Hungry Hippos. It's so much easier to line up artifacts from all our childhoods than to recall a six year old girl cowering in her room with a World Book encyclopedia open to H for Hiroshima, M for Mutually Assured Destruction, N for Nuclear Winter and a neat little diagram of a bomb, terrified that tomorrow or the next day, the world would end. Yet that always seemed to me to be the thick red line that divided my generation from the one that came behind us—we remember, I remember, when Russia was a swear word, when I prayed that we would be at the center of the blast, so that my little brothers wouldn't have to suffer.

It seems likely that we will now be remembered as the 9/11 generation. This is our cataclysm, our "where were you when." It is, as we are told by every news channel, the communal event which will color the rest of our lives—though it seems to paint only in shades of fear and xenophobia.

But we have always lived in fear. My generation feared the Soviet menace and nuclear annihilation with the pure terror that only children can summon up. We were helpless—we were just kids. We did not experience it the way the adult world did, even the nascent adults who came of age during those days. We were not a part of the world, we only watched it. We could receive the mandate to hate communism, but to us, there were no mediating details. Lenin meant nothing; glasnost was no more a word we could define than Jabberwock. The command was as simple and unadulterated as a stop sign: red means danger. We experienced that world without filter, and without attachment. The benchmarks that the then unnamed Generation X clung to were dazzling and out of reach for us. We watched Ferris Bueller and wanted to be that assured and careless, that capable of escape. We watched Molly Ringwold and thought we would never grow up to be that beautiful; we listened to Madonna with the blissful non-comprehension of little Dalai Lamas. We just wanted to be old enough to save ourselves.

Look at us now in our slinky, low-slung clothes and see boys and girls who never dreamed of being astronauts because we watched Christa McAuliffe detonate into the sky over our orange juice and eggs. Look at us and see boys and girls who were raised to be afraid, who were raised to distrust, who were painstakingly taught that nothing ever lasts. If there were a textbook on how to rear a nihilist it could not have delineated a bleaker paideia than ours.

It was not MTV that deadened us. It was the repetition, the numb recitation of events with no more creativity than kindergarten paint-by-numbers, reproduced time after time by clumsy and untrained hands. Shall we color in the borders of Iraq or Panama, Islamic minarets or the spires of the Kremlin? From the day we were born we were told to fear everything around us, to look in the corners and shadows for spies, for Vandals out to sack the beloved Republic. 9/11 is nothing more than a Renaissance for us, a return to old familiar ways of understanding, a return to ducking and covering under our wooden desks for protection. It is a communal event, but for us it does not mark the beginning of a new world order, but a revival of the old one.

Look at us. We are not Lost, we are not the Greatest, we are not Boomers, we are not X, we are not Y. We are not Pepsi’s generation, we are not Microsoft’s. We fall between the cracks of the brand-naming of age groups. If any symbol must be applied to us, we would prefer it be no symbol at all: Generation. For we are not a generation; we are leaves scattered on the ground. We are defined by our separateness. We take a long step back, my generation and I, and ask not to be a part of the machine that so loves to label and collate itself.

Look at us; look at the twenty-somethings with hands shoved into our pockets, grunting noncommittally at a world we still cannot affect. We are grown up, we have come of age, and nothing has changed. We do not make eye contact; we do not form ties that bind. We are overeducated, we are overburdened, we are overdosed. We are incapable of refraining from living as though there is no tomorrow, because part of us never believed we would make it this far. We are not shocked, we are never appalled. We believed as many as six impossible disasters before breakfast—what is another, and another, and another? We pride ourselves on our disillusion because we own nothing else we have earned so completely. We navel-gaze because our navels have never shown us horrors, and we mock everything with sardonic gesticulations practiced in front of the mirror each evening. We stand apart, because apart is all we know, all we trust. If we stand apart, we cannot be implicated, we cannot be hunted, we cannot be found. We are a generation that refuses to define ourselves. We do not want to commit to the system of definition—we are still six, still huddled behind the bedposts reading about Ragnarok in an encyclopedia.

It walks like apathy, but it doesn’t wear the right clothes. It is knowledge, and it is fear. We are still certain we are never going to grow up, not because we are Lost Children in Neverland, but because Neverland has gone up in a cloud of smoke and fire, and the fallout is still floating down from the sky.