Let
me tell you about the loser generation.
Our beginnings
were auspicious, as is a requirement to be a loser. Something had to be lost.
What happened specifically to me won’t match many other people’s story, but it’ll
be close enough, I hope, to identify with. And it doesn’t start when I was
born, but instead, in 1991.
In
kindergarten I didn’t know what was going on, just that we were in the other
classroom and the other teacher was telling us something important. She may
even have said we wouldn’t understand what was going on. I was young for my grade, five years old with a summer birthday. The Wall had come down when I was
three, and now the Soviet Union – and the Cold War with it – had collapsed. The
U.S. had won.
That
was a fact I would not understand fully until very recently. I understood historically
what had occurred years later, but the ramifications I am still grappling with.
The loser generation had the best
childhood in the history of world. If you were American, middle class,
growing up in the 90s there really was no better childhood for an average kid
that I can think of. We never had bomb drills. The economy was roaring, and the
middle class on the swell. Crime was down, optimism up, and no enemies. Never before had there been a global super power so totally unopposed. No one
in the world was there to challenge us, and scores of old feuds were being
settled. Ireland made peace. The Israelis and Palestinians made peace. The
Balkans settled. It was now Pax Americana and for a child with no understanding
of the background forces of the world all I knew was life was good.
When
the Gulf War broke out I asked my dad if he had to fight (since that’s what happens
in the movies and stories). But he explained the war would be over before he
could’ve gotten to a base. And so we became the first post-Cold War generation.
We had no memories of a time or life before then.
(Students
entering high school for 2012 will have no memory of 9/11. I was a sophomore in
high school by then.)
Our
title soon changed, though, due to other things in 1991. My school days were
standard for the time, perhaps. Slide rulers, dictionary drills (to find words
quickly), and learning from the librarian how to use the card catalogue. In
third grade we did some logo programming on computers. By fifth grade we were
learning how to make rudimentary HTML pages. They felt more like art projects –
expressive sheets about us filled with silly .gifs and garish .jpegs. I had
seen graphics come a long way from my mom’s Apple Plus – the screens weren’t
green anymore, the printers weren’t rotary. The screen and computer diverged
and the iMac lost the floppy drive. We were becoming the computer generation - the first ever to grow up with this technology and the internet at our fingertips.
Eighth
grade graduation came in 2000. I’d grown up north of Silicon Valley, and seen
the bubble burst. But the internet, and the companies that were critical to the
new world, were still around. Y2K didn’t happen. I went to high school with an
email address, an AOL chat name to keep in touch, and an interest in the
Bush-Gore election. In mock elections, that freshman fall, our hippie school
voted overwhelmingly for Nader. Such views perhaps aren't surprising for youthful
optimists.
Already
the tide was shifting, the halcyon days were preparing for storms again. After the
ugliness of the real election Bush proposed No Child Left Behind, and Boehner
cosponsored the bill, passing it that summer. This legislation, signed into law
in 2002, would affect everyone to go through school after us. It is a sharp
dividing line between me and the younger generation. We didn’t suffer tests the
way they did.
The
computer generation had by now been redubbed. We were the first teens experiencing
a post-9/11 world. I remembered the Oklahoma City Bombing, the photos in the
papers. Home-grown terrorism I could understand as a tragedy of life – no matter
how good we had it as kids there were still horrible moments, personal losses
and madness in the world. The notion of enemies abroad was inconceivable, though.
Not having
grown up on the east coast or having any connection to it I initially had
no knowledge or context for the Twin Towers. Likewise some, in their high
school mock elections, probably had a vast majority vote for Bush in their
schools. I can only tell my own story and in the process remark upon the moments and threads
that unite us, and define us, as losers.
Half
of one percent of Americans were enlisted in Iraq or Afghanistan. No one I knew
was. The Selective Service had been designed precisely for this sort of
contingency, and had it been invoked my time as a young man would have been very
different. But when I left high school the only thing that happened was that
during my freshman fall Bush was, to me and my friends' astonishment,
reelected. We had been too young, only teens, to demonstrate the first term,
and we were now too cynical to demonstrate against the second. I had voted for
Kerry, and my first experience with democracy was loss.
College
was busy. I’d gone to a small liberal arts school with a reputation for hard
work. Not an Ivy, but on the east coast. My mom moved to Boston. Steadily others began
to see the President in the same light as I had for eight years, and he was turned out with historically low approval ratings.
I’d
begun dating (having grappled with acne throughout high school) and was doing
well. The wars didn’t really exist. My view of how the world worked had
certainly shifted: there were enemies of the United States out there, politicians
don’t always make the right decisions, and Americans don’t always make the
right decisions. (For me any decision which preserves, increases or champions
human dignity is the right decision.) It would have been tempting to become
cynical and depressed, a condition I’d first encountered in high school, but,
as I said, I was busy and dating.
By
now our generation was making a new name for itself. Unlike most Americans
fellows like Mark Zuckerberg were not seen as young upstart, but as peers. Web 2.0 was here, and we were
interacting with each other in a new way – we were the target demographic as
well as the movers and shakers of this new type of connection. It was a way to be back
in control of our lives, if not 'irl'.
My
career path was teaching. I’d enrolled in a BA/MAT program in 2006, and so had
only one year of Grad school, basically a year of student teaching. I’d been
told this was a good path, and I was civil servant-minded. I wanted to help
people. And I was starting to froth against NCLB.
That fall of my graduate year I witnessed a very
different scene on my campus than that of 2004, with jubilant hugs, fireworks
and screaming for joy. A teary Virginian girl cried out in ecstatic repeated
disbelief “I live in a blue state! I live in a blue state!” For those of the
loser generation who experienced a different night the point remains - a very
different Presidency had begun. It felt to us to be vibrant and youthful, perfect for
the Web 2.0 Generation.
Yet
there was a distant thunder rolling in fast. Bush had left under a serious
economic crisis. By the swearing-in the greatest recession since the
1970s was taking place. My choice to get a Masters was now looking foolish.
Everyone gets in debt for school (excepting those families mine was vaguely
covetous of) but this social contract now looked very scary indeed. I had been warier than many of my friends, growing up in an economically fluctuating household,
and my fears were coming true. I had to pay about $600 a month for ten years.
More worrisome was getting a job at all. “Double Dip Recession” and “Depression”
were being thrown about and teachers were being sacked in the tens of thousands
per state. The baby boomers couldn’t retire and free up the positions we’d been
promised when I made my career choice in 2006. My Masters now meant that legally I had to be paid more to teach in a public school, but had only student teaching experience to back me up in applications and interviews.
We
graduated nervously.
Job
hunting was a full-time job that summer, and I very luckily got a position – in
October. We were now the group hardest hit by unemployment and underemployment
in the worst economic crises since the 30s: We were now the loser generation.
