In his memoir A Movable Feast, Hemingway wrote: “I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought ‘who is calling who a lost generation?’
Put the quote to the side a minute. You’ll make your own conclusions of relevance later.

Years ago, I self-published a book of poems called: Another Lost Generation.
In my innocence, I was inspired by Ernest Hemingway. I read his work and was especially galvanized by A Movable Feast. That youthful desire to seek a new language, a new country resonated with me.
I knew ennui…I felt directionless…as if I too were tossed out into the world after a war.

Generation X has been ascribed to starting somewhere between the early-to-mid-sixties.
But I wasn’t alive when Kennedy was assassinated.
Though I appreciate Camelot and its mythos-it’s not my mythos. And I don’t feel as it is a mythos that belongs to my peers.
However, as much as I do recognize the Kennedy Assassination as a historical turning point, it seems to me more of a dividing line.
Not so much as the “Have and Have Nots” but the “Whens and When Nots.”

While I was still struggling with Hemingway, Donald Coupland was finding the language that would elucidate our collective experience.
I imagine him fumbling to find that new language that could best describe this strange and wonderous landscape that we were born to.

We were the first generation of Latch-key Children.
We were the inheritors of Altamont, Patty Hearst, The Manson Family, Vietnam and Watergate.
Daisies, beads and bell-bottoms were not part of our truer inheritance.

Though many of us co-opted the 60s-it left us bereft. We were truly “Rebels Without a Cause.”
Our ideologies were not as easily put into the back of a closet like thrift store maxi-dresses.
We had no where to take our ideals. No exchange or co-op for our ideas.

It was inertia that caused us to be “slackers”-not laziness.

And it was in this environment that fomented our desire to not be assholes.

We were the first generation to come out of the closets and basements of America.

We were the first generation to explore alternative lifestyles on a mass scale.
We were televised across thirty-five channels, coast to coast and in living color.
By the time MTV and HBO rolled around, Camelot was but a dream, dreamnt by another, and lost in a fog.

Our generation couldn’t see our way out of the utter meaninglessness of a society that gained its strength by subjugating those who were different. Or weaker. We questioned that cultural rhetoric.

That’s why I don’t get this media battle between Generation X and the Millennials.
A contrivance that is perpetuated by the media.
It was the collusion between the Baby Boomers and Generation X that created the dialogue of understanding. We were the co-parents of films like Heathers and The Breakfast Club.
Because the 80s were about trying to slough off those skins that didn’t feel right.
That belonged to another time and place…trying to reconcile our desire to be our authentic selves against what was comfortable, safe and and suffocating.
We were two generations that wanted to celebrate our innocence while trashing cultural norms.

That’s why this hate directed at “Millennials” is mind-blowing at best.
Across the internet, people are divided by so much but nothing more heinous then by our own desire for idealogical blood-lust.
Someone, put in the hands of many, the tools to destroy, humiliate and criticize.
And thus to divide.
We greedily sup on false news and click-and-bait sites that are a recipe for disaster.
We know we have been told not to trust these things but we are addicted to the copypasta of guilt trips and shaming. We don’t grasp that our addiction to clicking is inherently connected to that part of our brain that likes to party.

And because of our ignorance, my generation is trapped in a malevolent game of Simon Says.
Sit down. Stand up. Kneel. Stand. Hand on heart. Fist in air. Call to action. Tear it down. Build it up. Share it. A conflagration of misused memes and jumbled GIFS.
We confuse terms like “snowflakes” and “Millennials” because we forgot their context. We let our fingers to do our thinking for us as they click-click away.
It’s not enough that we have Antifa and Neo-Nazis to deal with-we have to fear the Millennials as well.

Perhaps, we were being trolled by The Rebels without a Cause. The In-between Generation. Not quite a part of the Greatest Generation but not really a Baby Boomer.
I have long harbored a fantasy that the self-identified Gen Xers I talk with are actually embittered old men that have somehow learned to use the internet. Those children who just missed World War Two but were too old to really turn on, tune in and drop out
Everybody forgot about those guys and boy, are they pissed.
Maybe, the Silent Generation isn’t so silent anymore?

It would explain a lot wouldn’t it?

Gen Xers have told me how they had to fight against the older generation’s narrow-minded ideologies. How their hopes and dreams of success were bitch-slapped by the ghosts of Patton and Westmoreland. And how Baby Boomers used them as stepping stones on the way to the top.

They see Millennials as expecting to be treated like superstars.
They tell me how they are a privileged and pampered generation that just doesn’t understand what it takes to “make it.”
One person told me that the kids have to learn to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.”
They have to learn to take “take their licks” just like their generation had to.
They also told me that Millennials expected to be handed promotions, decent pay and “pats on their backs without “paying their dues” first?

I hear their argument but at the same time, I wonder to myself who procreated these monsters?
From whence did they come from? What alien species spewed them from unknown wombs?
Are they indeed the “rough beasts slouching their way to Bethlehem?”

We are on the precipice of a Renaissance of sorts. Or Revolution. Your choice.
The consensus is challenging old ideas. Our workplaces are becoming more diverse. Our homes redefining gender and social norms. We are more technologically advanced then we have ever been.
As a collective we were embracing-not just “how things are done” but “who does them.”

I don’t want to argue about dwindling resources. How our generation is being squeezed out by old people who won’t retire and a younger generation that is getting too hungry.
How our aging parents and aging children both sucked at the dried-out tit of our meager savings.
Because those things shouldn’t define our worldview or control our dialogue.
We have the power to hijack the story of our lives-and we should.
We have the power to say no to any internet rhetoric that is sexist, ageist, homophobic and racist.
We really don’t have to be that person… that person who is paternalistic and smacking of Colonialism.
We can take back-not our streets-but our internet. By doing this we get to be the authors of our own story once again.

I have no problem with having been a “slacker.” Whatever that entailed and still entails.
I’ll own it. I may not have ended up on the New York Times Best Seller List but I value my career now and I love what I’ve accomplished.
I deeply value my friends, family and my commitment to my community.
But more than that I find deeper consolation in the fact that I am not as asshole.

Renaissance or revolution? Your choice. Or we can all just blend into The Collective and let others inform our decisions.
Because that’s what’s happening, people. The old Divide and Rule.

So, Generation X, shut the f*ck up and grow a pair.
Here’s a goddamn daisy.