Today's installment of the Eric Chianese Chronicles will bring to the forefront something that's been on my mind quite a bit lately--and I warn you in advance, this isn't for the faint of heart.
There's a question that's been plaguing me: where has our collective sense of adventure gone? Let me be clear - I'm referring to my generation; known by the sociologists in their vulgar claptrap as "Generation Y." Despite my discomfort at being catalogued and analyzed in a manner befitting a new species of insect, I find the name appropriate. We have truly become a generation that asks why-and asks it too often. The native hue of resolution that is the birthright of American youth has, in Shakespearean fashion, become "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Perhaps some elaboration is necessary.
We are an apathetic generation-- no one is denying this and, hell, it's part of what makes us so bright. Of course, this apathy was temporarily broken with the tremendous outpouring of enthusiasm created by the Obama campaign.
Well and good, but let's not forget something: that enthusiasm was over a once-every-four-years presidential election and, more than that, it was something that was thoroughly within the existing system. Instead of burning with the fire and passion of youth, we've become a generation of armchair nihilists and play-it-safe philosophers.
The blame is not entirely ours. I've long had a bone to pick with the hippie counterculture movement of our parents' (in some cases, I suppose, grandparents') generation. They had the right idea at the outset: a complete rebellion against the staid, neo-Victorian order of the day. Except they gave up. The hippies got older, the Age of Aquarius didn't dawn and they realized that - wait a minute - they had to get jobs. And so they capitulated and paved the way for the most disgusting ideological group in recent history, the Reaganauts of the '80s. Our forebears lost that Hunter S. Thompson sense of their "inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil." Their ideology shattered and, subsequently, there were no great models for us to follow.
My essential complaint, I suppose, is this: we're jaded. Largely gone is our sense of the wonder and mystery in the world. We think, now, before we act and we rethink and we vacillate. We've become a generation without ideals--one which has no higher purpose than "get the grades, get the degree, get a good job, make a lot of money." That, fortunately, is not life and there is so much more out there if only one makes the effort to seize it.
Luckily, the disease is not yet terminal. Call it nihilism, call it apathy, but no matter the terminology one uses, this enfeebling of our generational sense of adventure is sucking the life from us slowly. We're becoming "a whole generation," as Camus described his post-WWII contemporaries, "intoxicated by nihilism and yet lost in loneliness, with weapons in our hands and a lump in our throats."
I see a gray future for us all if we don't start seizing the day. We need to recapture the sense of joie de vivre and what-the-hell confidence that has been lost somewhere along the line. Go on a road trip. Chase a dream. Most of all, find a passion that burns and live for it. Remember, you only live once-and some people not even that.
I guess the ideal that I feel deserves aspiration that can be best summed up by referring again to Thompson: "Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget that you come from a long line of truth-seekers, lovers and warriors." That's how legends are made.
Eric Chianese is an English junior. His column appears weekly.
