I’m the youngest person in my Sunday school class. It’s a literature-based class at the Episcopal cathedral (and no, I don’t mean genre “Christian fiction,” I mean Reynolds Price, Steven King, and Alice Walker stories that have faith-related themes.) We talk about other things besides just the stories that we’re reading, and last week several members of the class started talking about political activism and what the fuck is up with our nation’s young people that they don’t protest anymore. I kind of looked back at them matter-of-factly, and said that I understood that the current crop of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds are very politically active. They said something along the lines of “about damn time,” gave me a funny look, and changed the subject. (Episcopalians have good manners.)
It got me thinking about what the fuck was the matter with my generation– I have no idea what a statistician would classify as a generation, but I tend to group it as all of my siblings, plus some people older than my older sister, minus our little brother Trent, who was born in 1980. He has always had MTV and VCRs, so he is different. Generation X, more or less. Anyway, why did we never collectively hoof it and spend a couple of years getting out the vote, screaming in front of administration buildings, putting our life on hold while we fixed the world? It occurred to me that it’s probably because we, as a generation, are a lot like a middle child.
I am the most middle of middle child that you can be: I have an older sister, older brother, younger sister, and younger brother. I have every kind of sibling that you can have, and naturally, it’s affected my life. People tend to think that I must have grown up in orphan-like squalor and neglect, but in all honestly, it’s affected the way that I live my life at least as much as it’s affected the way that other people treat me. I read once that middle children always try to be different, and boy, is that true. The problem with that is that if your siblings are engaging in more or less standard rebellion, as mine were, you deliberately eschew a bunch of fun. Not that I avoided that sort of thing altogether, but generally I had this jaded attitude of how trite it all was when faced with drug use, casual sex, moving out of home at age eighteen to live in a really unsafe neighborhood with three roommates, and that sort of thing. I never liked the Violent Femmes, for instance, because my sister, Ginny, played them ad nauseum when I was about eight years old, and I was terribly scornful of anyone who thought that they were cutting edge when I was in junior high and high school. I still believe that they recorded their first album shortly after the Civil War, and that everyone “discovers” it when they hit junior high. (See what I mean about the jaded attitude? I’m jaded about something I didn’t even do!)
Luckily I had the chance to more or less rectify the situation when I went to law school. Since it was right after my divorce, in my late twenties (and thanks to all the clean living, I looked way younger), I decided to go ahead and use it as my golden opportunity to rack up some misspent youth activities. And I did, although given how firmly ingrained it was in my mind by then that I’m kind of lame, I still suspected that it had the air of “Norman Rockwell’s great-niece gets a little crazy!”
Whatever. We are who we are, and I have some major advantages from being a middle child. All this determination to be different has made me hyper-aware of whether I’m wringing enough enjoyment out of life: I’ve tried every hobby I ever wanted to, from grappling, to ice skating, to improv theater. Having something to prove has made me apply myself and get somewhere: I’ve got a nice condo, I’ve traveled internationally several times and for good stretches of time, I have a law degree and have tried a bunch of cases– I’ve gotten people out of jail! And I can get along with anybody. I can figure out what motivates anybody. I’m very adaptable, which as Darwin theorized, is the big secret of success.
But, still, there was a self-awareness about the whole thing. I knew that I wasn’t the center of the universe. I always knew that. I knew that other people had done X,Y, or Z before me, and I saw the effect it had on their lives. I heard the way that whatever they were doing was dismissed by adults as a phase and I saw that it often was, in fact, a silly phase, a predictable phase. When you’ve seen the same people go through the same motions every generation, it’s hard to see the point repeating the process. And as a generation, we lived in the daunting shadow of the Baby Boomers, who had so thoroughly, loudly, and publicly done everything that young people do that we had every right to be jaded about something we’d never done. Why give ourselves up to their scrutiny? Why set ourselves up for derision? Why deliberately engage in what could only amount to an imitation of what everybody on the planet had just finished doing? No, thanks.
So we didn’t spend our youth saving the world, I suppose. But maybe we’ll figure out how to do it differently, on our own schedule, when we understand why we want to do it in the first place. I expect it’ll be similar to what I did with my extended travel, my law school clubbing (and whatnot), and all the assorted goings-on that I still find myself getting into, now that I appreciate why I want to get into it in the first place. A good friend of mine is seriously considering leaving a high-paying job to enter the Peace Corps in a year or two. I work as a public defender, and write about how the system is screwed up and what we can do to fix it. Another friend recently left a seriously high-paying job to visit an ashram for three weeks, then took a six figure pay cut when she got home, to work in public interest.
So maybe instead of rebelling and then “selling out,” as first child generations seem to do, or just coasting altogether with lots of funding from our parents, as youngest child generations seem to do, my generation has decided to see the establishment from the inside, and then reject what we don’t believe in and keep what we do. Maybe there’s a really good chance that we’ll have a lasting effect on society by learning more about how it works before we try to change it. And we’ll do it with a solid foundation of education, a sense of perspective and maturity, and a thrill to be given the chance.
