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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Young readers write about saving the environment, the legacy of free love and how it's impossible to sum up a generation in a magazine article.
Sep 19, 2002 | [Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.]
Twenty-eight and frustrated!
I am 28 and a bit frustrated. I think, more than anything else, your generation frustrates us. The world I live in (and will live in after you are all gone) is much more complicated than the world you faced in your youth. The problem is, many in your generation refuse to recognize that fact and continue to condescend to us and otherwise behave in an ignorant manner.
I keep thinking of this encounter I had with a woman in her late 40s a few months ago. The day wasn't going all that well for me in the first place. And I almost completely lost it.
I was driving down California St. in San Francisco and smoking a cigarette. It was a Saturday and I had to go into work (a stressful job I hate but keep to pay for my student loans -- wasn't education practically free when you were young? I'm $100,000 in debt), but first I was going grocery shopping. I threw the cigarette out the window. OK, I know I shouldn't do that. But the next thing I know, this woman in a huge SUV was riding my tail honking and shaking her fist at me. She followed me for a few blocks. Finally, at the stoplight, I got out and not-so-politely asked her what her problem was. She said, "How dare you throw your cigarette out! Do you even care about the environment?"
You see, there is one issue I do care very deeply about, and that's the environment. But the environmental problems we face are much more serious than some fucking litter on a city street. I'm thinking of maybe global fucking ecological collapse and global warming, famines, drought, etc. I got red in the face angry, but didn't raise my voice, yet. I tried to politely ask how she could claim to care about the environment when she was driving a large, gas-guzzling vehicle. She said, "I take it to Tahoe, besides what's that have to do with your littering?" I lost it at that point. I said she was right, I shouldn't have littered. But it was her self-righteous attitude that was bothering me. I was screaming at this point, how could that bitch drive a gas guzzling monster and ask me if I cared about the environment?
She rolled up her window. I went back to my car and lit another cigarette to calm down. She didn't even listen to me. She certainly didn't see her own hypocrisy. I pulled into the store. There was a 40-ish couple strolling the aisles ahead of me. They stopped at the fish counter. The man pointed to some salmon. No, his wife explained, that fish was farm raised and that is bad for the environment. Do you have any "natural" (what does that fucking word mean anyway?) salmon? Yes, said the dopey 20-year-old know-nothing behind the counter. Well, the "natural" salmon was placed in the cart and the couple gave each other a brief "we solved another of the world's problems and we still got our shopping done" hug. The whole scene was such consumerist bullshit fantasy.
Yes, there are environmental problems with farm-raised fish. But meanwhile, we're fishing the "natural" fish to the verge of extinction. And these old farts walked away feeling self-righteous? I almost puked on the Phish-fan, know-nothing, jackass jerk-off clerk. Instead I opted for some tofu and tried to put the idiotic couple out of my mind.
Actually, your generation has grown to be a lot like the World War II generation. The WWII generation got back stateside with the attitude, "We just won the war. The world owes us a life of simplistic luxury and that's all there is to it." Your generation arrived at middle age in much the same way. We marched on some fucking antiwar, pro-civil rights marches and now we can do whatever we want. Except while the World War II generation had an attitude of attempting to forget what they had gone through, your generation wants its accomplishments writ large over everything they do. Not only was that couple buying fish, they were saving the environment. Not only was that old bitch driving a monster SUV, she was saving Pacific Heights from vile cigarette butts.
Many other voices from "my generation" will chime in. Few will be as frustrated and angry as I am (at least I hope). But their stories, I think, will show that we live in a very complicated age. We don't have anthemic problems that are easily sloganeered to rally the mass "youth culture." We have very complicated and very controversial problems to solve. They are fundamentally different from the much more clear-cut (at least to me) problems your generation faced. We already have to solve them, carrying your parents on our backs. We can't do it with you up our ass too.
-- Name withheld by request
