What's next?

From the sophistication of the Rat Pack in the 50’s, to the free loving Flower Children of the 60’s, followed by the psychedelic green revolution and women’s liberation movement of the 70’s, and the health conscious money driven Yuppies of the 80’s, finally making it’s way to the Internet Generation of the 1990’s-2000’s. It’s pretty obvious we’ve come a long way. Each generation has been focused on a different ideology, but they’ve all been focused on moving forward. With each youth movement there has been an innate need for innovation, rebellion, and communication.

We rebel in order to produce change; and one of the greatest movements of all has enabled us to reach out and bring awareness on a higher level – Free Speech Movement. Today’s generation has so many vehicles of communication, so many ways of disseminating information that it has become beyond difficult to not know what is going on in the world.  But what are we fighting for these days, what are we advocating for? Activism and social issues aren’t the same as they were in the 1960’s, patriotism has overshadowed our protests against the war; corporation’s have been hit so hard by the economy that creating a riot due to the high levels of unemployment wouldn’t really shake or move much. We might not be dealing so heavily with social issues like the generations before us; but we are dealing with global issues, which have been even more difficult to overcome. I feel like most of us have been waiting for those who lead the world to do their job and fix our problems – they caused it, now they fix it. If that’s our way of thinking then we haven’t learned much from those famed “hippies”. We each need to do our part to produce change; leaning on those who have led us astray isn’t the answer, crossing our arms and putting the blame on others never helps.

If you’ve been paying attention to the media lately you may have noticed that little by little they’ve been trying to get us to stand up for ourselves – shocking I know. But, look at the people who are being emphasized for their strength and courage, people being praised for their achievements, for their charity work, for bringing awareness to the public about the world’s current situation – celebrity or commoner, the spotlight is being put on those who are trying to make a difference. Even the film industry has been reinventing old stories and characters, making their background darker and more aggressive, thus giving them even more incentive to achieve greatness. For example, the new “Alice in Wonderland” film will portray a more warrior-like Alice. She’s not the lost little girl anymore; she’s way more empowered and courageous this time around, thus giving girls a new heroine to look up to. Then there’s the new “Robin Hood” movie also coming out next year. Be ready to see a different side of Robin, there are no men in tights in this movie. He is a military man who has fought in the 3rd crusade and now must fight against tyranny and corruption in order to take back what is rightfully his and that of the people. Are you seeing the same trend I am?

But, alas, there will be no hero to come and save us from our crummy situations. And apparently we don’t need one. Each one of us needs to show responsibility and accountability for what is to come of us. We can’t really revolt against our government – what good would that do? What we can do is start to bring even more awareness and get more people involved in helping our cause. Do we really want to be branded as “Generation W”, the generation of whiners? I didn’t think so.

Every generation has been revolutionary in it’s own way. We’ve been called the iGeneration – I for Internet, not for the great abundance of iPod’s – for a while now. Well, it’s about to be 2010 in a couple days, and I want to believe it’s safe to say that a new generation needs to be put into play. Being known for sitting in front of a computer 90% of the time isn’t really what I would want to be remembered as – no offense, I know the internet has been a phenomenal tool in truly democratizing access to information and enabling us to participate on a global level on various forms of communication. But, it’s time to be innovative once again and try to be our own hero/heroine in order to get ourselves out of these murky waters. If the principle of deduction hasn’t been working (going from global to individual), then maybe the notion of induction might prove to be more useful (moving from individual to global).