Activism and idealism

I certainly don't think your generation is anything like what your parents were like, though you do seem to have a vast repository of a particular brand of nostalgia that I'll call "activist/idealist." Just this weekend I debated my dad's claims that people are growing up to be so much more superficial, disengaged and passionless than they used to be. He sounded like a cranky old man at the age of 47, except that he wasn't bemoaning a decline in morals in the traditional sense, but a lack of spirited engagement with the world. He maintains the Internet and TV saturate us with so much that younger generations learn to passively accept these virtual realities as their own experience.

I'm 27, raised by parents who caught the tail end of the hippie era and have always been crazier than I am. Maybe that's because they had me when they were 20 and divorced shortly thereafter, but it seems to me that they're still trying to get their lives together, still trying to figure out what they want and how to be happy.

My dad always told me to experiment with life, with relationships, to do what makes me happy. He bought me my first bong, read me Richard Bach and Tolkien, and made furniture with fairies and flowers on it. My mom took another route and became a divorce lawyer, remarried and moved us to Connecticut. And now, neither has retirement savings or health insurance, one had cancer and still smokes, while the other has a host of new-age illnesses that no one can fix. I think of my parents as representative of the baby boom era, with their combination of passion, self-delusion, freedom and irresponsibility.

I say, as it has always been, there are many things both worse and better now, and it all balances out in the end. I may have a shorter attention span thanks to so much surfing on the Net, but I'm passionate and engaged and I've learned from my parents' example -- and the threat of AIDS and nuclear attack -- to be strategic. Key rules I've lived by:

1) Experiment safely: Date people of different races and classes, but make sure they don't trample over you.

2) Change jobs, but only when you've got another lined up or at least savings to see you through.

3) Look ahead for the breaking point in a relationship so you can leave first.

4) Pay off debt and put some away in a 401K.

5) Avoid musicians and artists at all costs unless it's solely a one-night stand.

6) Try to change the world because it's really messed up, but do it within the system or else you'll burn out.

I fell in love with someone who balances me and makes me happy, not someone that sets me afire because I know that kind of passion is part delusion and always temporary. I've tamed my freedom a bit for the joys of a genuine commitment, but unfortunately, it hasn't appeased that hunger you talked about, that unfillable spiritual emptiness.

I used to wait for the magic wardrobe/cairn/mirror to appear, the one that would take me to my real life in another reality, the one that would finally give me the sense of abiding comfort that I'd been missing. But then I thought about all the time I was wasting just waiting, and tried to follow the advice of spiritual texts that say the key to happiness is learning to appreciate what you have. It hasn't really worked, but what else can you do?

In the end, I'm more like my parents than I'd like to be, and I feel sometimes like the parent/child role has gotten switched. They don't have the answers either, and they've made a lot of mistakes, but they sure have had a lot of fun along the way.

-- Rachel DuBois

AIDS and divorce

I'm not so very young, but I can tell you what it was like to become sexually active after the dawn of AIDS. I was born in 1975, and everyone my age wears a condom every single time. It's expected, and the men don't complain. In fact, many sexually active women from my generation never even tried hormonal birth control. If we need to use a condom anyway, why bother? Besides, the pill is way out of most college students' budget. Sex without a condom (using the pill or a diaphragm) is considered a luxury built into long-term relationships. A discussion about switching birth control methods is a declaration of trust, and a commitment to stay together for at least another season.

Among my peer group, there is a growing positive attitude toward marrying young. Marriage doesn't seem to carry the same shackles that it used to. Children of divorce grew up watching their fathers cook, clean and do laundry, and their mothers fix the toilet, change the oil and cut the grass. The idea that husbands and wives have different roles is a foreign notion to many people my age. My husband and I view marriage as a piece of paper that makes it easier to deal with other pieces of paper -- specifically the rectangular green ones with pictures of presidents on them. We've saved thousands of them on car insurance and health insurance since the wedding. When you hear about people who got married in their early 20s, they don't necessarily have "traditional" values. They may simply want to share the love, the dental and the 401k.

-- Heather Wiatrowski

Recent Stories