"Time to come and play with the Tweenies!" (A call to arms.)

 

[Bombast alert!  I can't help it. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't stop thinking.]

 

I don't know what my generation is called. Technically we're the very tail end of the Baby Boom, but we're still raising small children, while the real Boomers are playing with their grandkids and retiring (they have a term for it in France: le Papyboom). We were in our twenties when thirtysomething was at its height; we related to it, but you got slapped down by the real thirtysomethings if you said so. We were in our early thirties when Douglas Coupland coined the term Generation X, and we related to that too, but in popular understanding it didn't really include us--we were outside it by maybe three to five years, those of us whose earliest memories are of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the moon landing, the Peace Corps. We weren't Cold War kids; we were Détente kids. We never had to hide under our desks.

 

And we never really had anything to fight for. When I was a teenager I can remember being desperate for a cause, and grabbing at nuclear disarmament and Apartheid (remember the shanties on Beinecke Plaza?), and longing for the unity of purpose that my parents had had. And Reagan was elected president before we were old enough to vote. We had no voice and we never found one. And so we all worked at earning careers and eventually at raising children and we found ourselves in our forties without ever having made any kind of distinctive political mark on the world.

 

And you know what? I was so used to the idea of "change" being the province of youth that it never occurred to me that we were going to make our mark as GROWNUPS. This new administration is OUR GENERATION. And it embraces both youth and age--we are Boomers AND we are Gen-Xers. We can "reach across the aisle."

 

You hear, guys? This is what we've been waiting for. Now's our chance. We have a cause: rebuilding America, restoring the balance of the world. Did you ever really want a lesser challenge?

 

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

And we have come into our heritage.

                        --Rupert Brooke

(the rest of the poem is inappropriate.  But these lines are perfect.)

Links to posts about Getting to Work:

 

sartorias

  here;

 

rosefox

  here (the bit about work comes at the end of this post, but I think she says it well);

and

katranides

  here.

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(oh and BTW go Yohannes Gebregeorgis!)