With the rise of unsupervised dating and coeducational universities in the U.S. at the end of the Victorian period, there emerged what could legitimately be considered a youth culture. Kids had the opportunity to go out and meet other young people at clubs and the movies, and the older generations made the startling discovery that kids, when left to their own devices, do the exact same things adults do when left to their own devices. Young men and women could no longer be counted on to be as docile and god-fearing as before. Kissing and long embraces flooded the silver screen. Kids actually learned about sex before their wedding days. Child belly futures plummeted. Thus began the cycle of retaliation against youngsters by each grown generation since. At last, inevitable change had a single face to slander.

Of course, the current crusade to save "Generation Y" is just another loop in the same cycle. Kids Today are directionless, lazy and superficial. Kids Today engage in deviant sexual behavior and shoot each other in their schools. Kids Today care about nothing -- not the future, not themselves, not their peers. So the worn story goes. We are not looking at a generation without recourse to direction or normative ideals. It's not that their parents haven't been around to teach them a system of ethics or that religion (implied, Christianity) is suppressed in schools. Kids today have plenty of outlets for self-righteous energy, from environmental groups and gay pride groups to church youth groups to an (albeit ever-narrowing) array of sports, music and theater groups offered in schools. Yet as vocal and active as such groups may be, they remain a minority.

Why? Because they are all lame. Environmentalists are lame. Jesus freaks are lame. Punks, goths, frat boys and sorority chicks, indie rockers, skaters, stoners, hipsters, hippies, newagers, and communists are all exceedingly lame, too. Nerds are lame, and nerd pride is lamer. Smoking is a dumb facade, but not as dumb as anti-smoking campaigns. Self-absorbed, optimistic athleticism and health fanaticism are lame, but not as lame as self-absorbed, depressed fattiness. Republicans and democrats speak to nothing but lame-wad issues, Greens are both lame and misguided, and conservatives of any sort (especially young conservatives) have always been the lamest of all.

That kids doubt the effectiveness of such idealistic pursuits is nothing new. People, especially the younger generation of any given era, have long doubted the existence of an ideal beyond the substantive (for western culture, arguably since the Christian church began to lose its hold on social structure in Europe). What has salvaged the enthusiasm of the masses in the past has been large-scale image campaigns -- creating and evoking an often visually-dominated 'picture' that could capture people's imaginations. In the early part of the last century, there was the glamour of movie stardom and the decadence of wealthy romantic love to motivate people toward consumption and a new sexual frontier, later joined by 'Rosie the Riveter' and other wartime icons. The '50s saw an explosion of imagery depicting the ideal of bourgeois domesticity with plastic-fantastic and better living though science ads as well as images demonizing everything soviet in the accelerating cold war hysteria. The '60s youth culture had its experimental, activist and psychedelic icons; the '70s and '80s had their own material idylls as well. However, today's kids have grown up in an image-inundated culture, where "the medium is the message," and in many cases kids are much more media savvy than the adults trying to capture their enthusiasm for whatever purpose. Having seen and seen through a multitude of different techniques to sway them through imagery -- the juxtaposition of opulence and manic happiness with a banal product, "This is your brain on drugs," the "let's-get-real" approach that really wasn't getting real, the commercial that realizes it's a commercial (e.g., where the actors are startled by a voice-over), the commercial that laughs about its being a commercial (e.g., the nike "Griffey for President" campaign) -- young people know enough not to trust any message that doesn't have a concrete pay-off. Thus the mainstream apathy toward those image campaigns that don't yield palpable results, as is the case with many of the groups listed above. Alongside such factions that adopt a stock uniform and image to some degree, those groups that adopt a credo of individuality, opting out and claiming exemption from the mainstream image of 'cool' (e.g., the nerds and fundamentalist christians) have become equally transparent and homogenized.

My boss, Rick, was saying today that people never change from generation to generation; only the situation in which people find themselves changes. While this opens a can of worms involving determinism and where personality resides, the important thing to remember is that there are large-scale fluctuations in attitude as reflected by art, economic activity, political involvement, etc., and initially influenced by the economy, major historical events, and various other social factors. Naming, defining and describing a generation is fundamentally arbitrary and done in order to, in Rick's words, "make people feel unique," or in mine, help us define who we are so that we can center our world on some definite being and type of perception -- make sense of it all, tell a coherent story. Looking to the situation in which a generation (as separated by their ages and memories of major world and national events) is raised instead of tagging the members of that generation with certain traits leaves open the possibility for people to creatively define themselves. A mold, once imposed, can only be fit or rebelled against -- all actions fall in relation to the mold. Instead of allowing the inevitable alarmist whiners to label each new generation as the coming rapture, we need to better define the society into which we are bringing our children so that they can appropriately deal with the challenges they will face and make situation-appropriate responses.

For example, the real problems kids face with sex, the real problems with violence today are not a product of generation Y's own behavior. The seeds of these problems were present beforehand, as were the warning signs. Older folks are the ones who transformed sex into a commodity and simultaneously glorified violence and eliminated all healthy expression thereof. I'm not trying to pin blame on a different generation. The process that turns our bodies and those of others into mere material does not belong to any age group. And telling kids that their generation is all hedonistic, sex-crazed thugs only reinforces that behavior as normal and leaves kids who aren't having lots of casual sex with the feeling that they're missing out on the party.

In dealing with these issues, 'social change' in the traditional sense is not necessary or practical. Any movement that tries to rally kids toward a party line will most like earn more backlash than recruits. We can't expect to unite a large percentage of people under a paradigm that doesn't yield substantive, gratifying results, because we have nothing (no image) in which everyone can put confidence, regardless of how sweet the fairy tale an image may conjure. Instead, we need to emphasize the possibilities for positive growth in the advancing paradigm of doubting the 'greater' goal -- find an existing trend and show how it can be harnessed positively. (If this seems backward, consider the amount of damage that previous, idealistic generations around the world have wrought.) In defining young people, it's important that we not be predictive (read: prescriptive) in our analyses, but instructive. With this in mind, we can turn back to the current young generation.

When you take away ideals, a focal center, the belief in a vision of a culture or 'counter-culture', all that's left is yourself and stuff. The rules of stuff -- how stuff behaves and how we must interact with stuff -- can then be seen as arbitrary, a game to either play or avoid. While this may lead some to the violence of the meta-game ("knocking over the chessboard, shooting the referee" in Pynchon's words -- i.e., if rules are arbitrary, why not move beyond them?), there are always those who are left behind, those to provide the shocking behavior and sound bites in any era. For the most part, i see kids my age and younger in pursuits typical to their age and with a reasonable amount of drive, though it may be a drive without a lofty goal, a drive to merely play the game well. The turn from the ideal could mean nothing more than a growing focus on process. I see increasingly more kids hacking it at various activities without consideration for 'talent' or formal training, increasingly more kids taking up painting, sewing, woodwork and carpentry, quilting, electronic repair and construction, and horticulture. People's hobbies read like a Sally Struthers earn-your-degree-at-home commercial, with a proliferation of grounded, process-driven yet productive (i.e., gratifying) endeavors. It's pretty uncool not to be able to fix minor automotive problems on your own, and virtually all of upper-middleclassdom has become amateur chefs and brewers.

(In saying that kids are becoming more grounded, i do not mean that this generation is 'getting real' in the common conception of the phrase. We are not talking about adopting a sassy, tell-it-like-it-is attitude like that ham-fisted black woman from The View, though i have known plenty of peers to inappropriately try this approach. The only responsible authenticity now is uncertainty and groundlessness.)

In keeping with this, younger folks around me seem to be taking greater interest in the directly observable, the local. For one, emphasis on local government seems to be rising. Talk about national issues still dominates, but city ordinances, school board rulings and county and state issues are creeping into the discussion as well. Right now i have two friends running for municipal offices in their respective cities, and i overhear barroom conversations about local open space and mayoral issues. Also, i see patronage of local businesses rising. The fact that such affiliations are often tempered with a disclaimer -- "I'm not an environmentalist, but...," "I'm not a feminist, but...," "I'm not some kind of fucking hippy, but...," etc. -- tells me that kids are not responding to organized, 'leftist' efforts, but instead to disillusionment and mistrust of things out of sight and buried in the machinery. It's nice to know the people selling you groceries, making your beer and running your city, to support people who are trying different ways of earning cash, and i think we're beginning to recognize that despite hackneyed propaganda telling us it's the right thing to do.

If these trends materialized into something around which the coming generation could grow, we could expect a modestly positive change from the past. The do-it-yourself, bordering on artisan, trend in hobbies and a concentration on locality promotes direct personal connection, be it talking with the brewmeister at a local tavern or sitting around and jamming with a bunch of half-assed guitar players. It is precisely these kind of connections that de Tocqueville considered the United States' saving grace -- the one thing that could spare it from dissolving into factionalism. Although these changes really only affect those with enough leisure time to follow local issues and learn how to play an instrument or successfully operate a scroll saw (or the money to buy local), the practicality and wander-up-to-the-hood sort of cooperation of many such interests may allow more ties between groups otherwise disparate and even invert power relations, if only momentarily.

The coming generation holds no great promise, definitely no greater than its predecessors. The step toward locality would still be a narcissistic one, but at least it would harbor the roots of actual community. Even the splintered, variously assimilated remnants of our parents' generation of love haven't been able to accomplish that. We would probably also see a fairly dead intellectual scene, buried behind a foreground of small, personal endeavors -- the artisans before the artists -- but perhaps we're at a point where the pure idea has been stretched enough. If the current scene suffers from a frenetic collage of influences, if pretense and authenticity are often indistinguishable and much art survives only as a commentary on Art, maybe we need people who are willing to go back and own their medium. Just as they hold no great promise, kids of today bear no great evil. We have much more to worry about from the frantic clawing of the Christian coalition and a harshly conservative administration's advancement on civil liberties than the usual indifference of teens. Why are boomers blowing the whistle on kids when they're the ones with the standing and monetary influence to actually affect the major problems we face? Instead of biting our nails and waiting for the apocalypse, we need to take a more mature position in our analysis, accent the better aspects of our society and keep a bit of the faith ourselves.