Iraq, I'll admit, is kind of a big deal. Achieving world peace is worth energy. Another big problem is global warming; I'm against it, and I think something ought to be done. As for our country specifically, there's no end to ills: illegal immigration, Social Security and urban poverty come to mind. Honestly, though, I can't bring myself to worry about these issues for more than a few seconds at a time. There's a much more important problem, and I can't get it out of my head: our generation needs a name.
Trivial? Definitely. But we can't ignore it! What will the history books think? Frankly, they'll probably think nothing at all; without a catchy nickname, we've got little chance of being remembered period. All the great generations have had them: the baby boomers, hippies, yuppies, Generation X. You might argue that the middle two were only segments of their generations, but that's irrelevant; they were representative of their times, the heart of their eras. Who's the heart of our era? "Kids Who Chat Online A Lot and Loved Napoleon Dynamite?" That's not going to cut it.
All of this is not to say that no one's tried to name our generation -- it's just that all attempts so far have been abysmal. Unless, of course, you'd like to set sail in the epic sea of immortality as "Generation Z" or "The Millenials."
Seriously, if we're ever going to make something of ourselves as a group of largely unrelated people who happened to be born at roughly the same time, we need to fix this. The "baby boomers" moniker worked so well that they quickly gained cohesiveness and power -- at this point, they pretty much run the show. Their parents did them one better, pulling off the ultimate coup in generational nomenclature: crowning themselves the "Greatest Generation" (with the help of their lackey, Brokaw). Clearly our goal must be to usurp them and declare ourselves the "Sweetest Generation," but it's a little early for that.
I'm even willing to settle for a solid name for this decade. After all, we're reaching adulthood and making our place in the world during it. Great decade names are really generational expressions anyway; the "Roaring Twenties" call to mind flappers doing the Charleston, and the "Me Decade" evokes too-young, too-rich real estate tycoons doing lines of coke off their dates' legwarmers.
We face a few problems, though. First off, "The '00s" itself is unpronounceable. More importantly, what pithy, catchy phrase would we use to describe our times? "The Globalized, Irony-Drenched, Terrorism-Terrified Dawn-of-the-New-Millennium" doesn't exactly lend itself to bumper stickers.
The worst problem is that I'm trying to define in the present what can only be understood in the past. I can't help it -- VH1, after all, launched "I Love the '90s" practically as soon as the decade ended. Nostalgia is accelerating at a dangerous rate. To borrow from The Onion, we may be running out of past. This only makes the need to name our generation more urgent. If we don't define the character of our time, nostalgia will overtake the present, a cataclysm I can only imagine would resemble the onslaught of The Nothing in "The Neverending Story." We, unfortunately, won't have a white, flying dog-beast to help us.
So, I've firmly established the need to name our generation. I might as well attempt to do it myself. "Greatest Generation" alliterates nicely, but I think we can do better. "Google Generation?" Could work. Maybe "Gogurt Generation." We are young adults on the move, after all, and in this Internet Age, we need a hip, high-velocity yogurt. Thinking of when we were born, "Eighties Babies" has a certain ring. Unfortunately, it's the ring of vomit-inducing cuteness. We were all raised on classic Nickelodeon -- I think "Rocko's Kids" fits, or perhaps just "Rugrats." On the other hand, our generation is largely hopelessly white suburban kids who idolize gangsta rappers -- maybe "Bling-Bling Babies" is the way to go.
Another key characteristic is that a great many of us are passionately opposed to President Bush and an extremely divisive war rages on, and yet almost none of us is willing to put even a fraction of the effort into protest that our parents did. We're angry, but apathetic. The "Apa-Angries?" Probably not.
The true test of any defined generation is what culture makes of it, what great artists weight in. "Easy Rider," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Sixteen Candles" come to mind. As of late, the mainstream press has exalted Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes as the great musical genius of his generation.
Will he sing about Gogurt?
