Now It's Time For Generation Next

From one generation to another, the complaint is always the same: they are not like us. This seems more obvious than ever before, looking at these children through the long lens of the 20th century as we leave it. Born after Watergate and Vietnam, gas lines and record albums, heirs to the microchip and the cathode-ray tube, under pressure from parents who are high achievers or who wish they had been, in a world in which seemingly endless choices, good and bad, swirl around them like flakes in a snow globe: they live a life that the one-size-fits-all generations before them can scarcely imagine. I memorized the Baltimore Catechism; to this day I can tell you that God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next. By contrast our kids and their classmates have had endless discussions about whether God exists, whether God has gender, whether a merciful God would countenance AIDS or airplane crashes.

This core generational belief, that there is usually more than one answer for any question, is threatening for their elders, raised on "because I said so." So is the fact that they are not all of a piece. The dutiful son has a pierced tongue. The student-government president dresses like Morticia Addams. Where once we could identify who was who by the college, the color, the crew-neck sweater, now the lines of identity are constantly blurred, in our perceptions and in the stages of their lives.

This is disconcerting, difficult and wonderful. Socratic is better than rote. Discussion teaches more than dictums. And paths set in stone are, we've discovered, often rocky as we move along them. These are the children of peace, prosperity and pluralism. Raising our glasses on the most momentous New Year's Eve of our lives, wondering what the future will bring to America, we can look at them and in large part know the answer. And what we know is good.

© 2000