Campfyre Stories

Me too, Belit.  Making your voice heard is so important for people of our generation and yet it’s something we don’t do nearly enough of.  The defining points in our upbringing and in our childhoods were watching the radicals of the previous generation sell-out and focus on money.  We watched the Challenger explode and the space program (or at least the public interest in it) peter out.  We learned from the children of the 60’s that even with the best intentions, you cannot change the world, at least not for the better, and even if you succeed a little bit, not for very long.  We learned from our parents that they would fall into the same lines of thinking as their parents did, judging our music and hairstyles and clothing styles harshly and we learned that when we became parents we would do the same things.

We watched as AIDS was discovered and named and we watched a child of our generation, Ryan White, die from this virtually unknown disease.  We listened in our classrooms as our teachers explained the importance of condom usage and then watched on the news as the politicians explained to our parents that easy access to such important things was inappropriate for people too young or too self-conscious to go to a drug store and buy them.

We watched as our peers attempted suicide in numbers that infected pop culture and made the news.  We watched our peers become teen mothers in greater numbers.  There was still shame, but less stigma.  No longer were these young women sent away, they remained in our classes with us and then disappeared to have/raise the baby.  We watched as our parents divorced with alarming frequency.

We watched as the world changed drastically around us, through no doing of our own.  We heard stories of the changes directly affected by our parents, but, as far as I can tell, we didn’t reap any benefits from that. 

We are MTV, we are cable, we are cordless phones and pagers, we are early computers.  What defines our generation is nothing we’ve actually done, but the things that were done around us, as Belit states, at a rapid pace.  Things changed faster than our parents could keep up, but we could, and we did, but we did nothing to create it or to even coax it, we were always just along for the ride.

We learned that everything has to be newer, better, faster, NOW and, for the most part, we are often impatient over everything.  So much changed in our world as we grew and now that we are grown we have come to expect that these things will, no, should still be changing at the pace we choose.

We take things for granted that should shock us, but we take them in stride.  We are jaded and bitter, but accepting.  We all know that we won’t likely see a dime of our hard-earned Social Security, but we’ve known that for a while.  We will care for the larger number of people in the previous generation, but we do not expect that the generation behind us will do the same for us…  I think most of us doubt that it would ever even cross their minds.

We are a small generation of watchers.  We grew up hearing that one day we would run the world, and maybe we will, but we won’t do it alone, and we will still be the minority.  We gather wisdom from witnessing and judging that which goes on around us.  It’s not that we’re apathetic, it’s that we’re powerless, and even if we’re not, we’ve been made to feel so, simply because we have had NO SAY in the changes in the world for as long as we’ve been around.

So we accept things.  We watch things going on around us.  We pay attention to the world and do what little we can to feel like we’re contributing, but what we’re really doing is watching.

We are the babysitters.  We will tell anyone who is willing to listen exactly what’s going on and why.  We accept that no one will listen and that our hands are tied, but we will continue to talk about it until it makes some difference.

In some ways I feel like we’re the ones who really know what’s going on.  For good or bad, for conservative or liberal, for peace or war, we’re watching.

Isn’t that nice to know?

Doesn’t that make you paranoid?

~FG };^>