Monday, May 10, 2010

An Open Letter to Our Parents' Generation

DEAR BABY BOOMERS,


This is a letter of grievance. I am writing on behalf of my voiceless, nameless generation, because no one else has stepped forward to speak for us. I find myself forced into this position by the silence of my peers, a silence that I fear will go unbroken forever unless I say tonight, once and for all, that enough is enough—enough silence, enough cheerful compliance, enough sleepwalking through the predetermined channels of this privileged world. It's time to make a stand, to reveal to the world the awful damage you have inflicted, in your infantile complacence, upon each and every one of us, damage that will not leave us as long as the world continues to bear the uneraseable mark of your self-satisfied decadence.


You never tire of parroting that tired platitude to the effect that, when we take our place as the leaders of tomorrow, it will be our job to fix the mess that you made. You say it, almost in unison, with slight smiles on your lips, because by now it has become a self-depricating joke. But, joke or no, I have a serious response: how about you clean up your fucking mess? By leaving it to us to repair the irreparable harm you have done the world, all you're doing is ensuring that you will continue to control us, as you always have, even after you're all dead or retired. You rebelled against your parents but made it impossible for us to rebel against you—God forbid it should go on my permanent record. You instilled in us the fear and shame that you once thought you could live without. You dangled prizes in front of us to make us do whatever you wanted, and most of us are still frantically, pathetically grasping at them.


Admit it, you never really gave a fuck about us. All you ever wanted was to look at us and see your own pleasing reflection. You wanted to prove to the world and to yourselves that you were good parents, that you read all the right books and played all the right classical music and hired all the right coaches and specialists. To you we were bundles of joy, problems to be solved, gifts and challenges, little Manhattan Projects all requiring the constant supervision of an army of trained professionals to make sure that we were developing within normal parameters—never, even for a single second, were we human beings. Most of all, we were springs to satisfy your insatiable thirst for even more affirmation that, yes, you parented us well: higher test scores, more accomplishments, more prestigious awards, all crammed onto the resume, but it's still never enough for you—like Saturn, you devour your children.


You treated us like extraordinarily expensive kitchen appliances upon whose proper functioning depended the whole of your happiness and self-worth. Whenever something went wrong, after shouting and crying and screaming "Why is this happening to me?" you called the repairman. Falling grades? Call the learning specialist! Emotional problems? Call the cognitive behavior therapist! Drugs? Send that little ingrate to rehab! You treated us like machines and we became like machines, like Pac-Man chomping up an endless line of prearranged activities without a thought in our heads about why we're doing it, and then you wondered why we started dumping handles of Smirnoff down our gullets the second our prearranged activities ended and we managed to scrape together some unsupervised time. Our automaton hedonism is, like everything else, just the result of a cost/benefit analysis, that mechanical mental operation which, thanks to your guidance, we perform as naturally as breathing and to the exclusion of all other thought.


We were always supposed to be just like you. Remember that commercial, for Microsoft or something, in which the idealized bourgeois futures of bright-eyed schoolchildren—doctor, scientist, senator—are circumscribed about them in imaginary chalk? That ad just made literal what you had always seen when you looked at us: we were to be exact replicas of you, only without the rough edges or the rocky past. You fell into the abyss of sex and drugs; we were going to develop completely according to plan, and then we were going to thank you for your commitment to parenting as we stepped up to the podium to accept yet another award, another line on the resume and another sweet morsel of validation in your voracious mouths. But tonight, as you can see, I'm not thanking you for anything. I'm saying shame on you. Shame on you for hurting us like that, shame on you for drinking our blood and feeding on our suffering, and shame on you doubly for making us believe that it was all in the name of good parenting. All this time, you never gave a fuck about us—all you ever did, every day, was suck us dry and howl for more.


We have inherited the mess you made, and that mess is us. And we sure as fuck won't be able to clean it up if we end up just like you, just like you always wanted us to. Our only hope is to wake up, and say enough is enough, to see how we've been cheated out of our youth, out of our lives, before the last spark of life is extinguished and we succumb, once and for all, to the undertow of a comfortably joyless life. It's already happening all around me: conversations are becoming clusters of banal one-liners, the gleam of desperation behind eyes is giving way to weary resignation and finally to the empty cheerfulness of the walking dead. But it isn't too late for us yet—we still have a chance to rise above it all, to become THE INFINITE GENERATION that you, our parents, mistakenly took yourselves to be. But this path no benevolent grown-up has prearranged for us, with a Ritz crackers and a Capri Sun waiting for us at the end; this one we will have to blaze ourselves, and we may have to blaze through some things that we've gotten used to letting stand in our way.


Sincerely Yours,

Nicholas T. Cox, 10 May 2010