the skipped generation

Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but I look around at the guys I call my friends (what they call me is a different story) and I see a group of men who have never been given any direction. None of us really seem sure of ourselves, or else we strut around with a chip on our shoulder trying to prove that we don't need anyone to tell us who we are, thank you very much.

It seems that if there isn't a serious conflict overseas to distract us, we turn our suspicious gaze on our children. That was why everyone was so concerned with "Generation X." The Gulf Conflict was over and everyone got bored. No one knows what to do if they don't have an enemy. So we tackled the problem of those depressing youngsters and their destructive grunge music.

Those scary boys and girls in their flannel shirts and crazy hair are now lawyers and doctors and teachers and whatnot. Some of them became alcoholics and prostitutes, just like the media said they would, but there have always been alcoholics and prostitutes. Those Gen-Xers were just filling a niche.

And so, while all eyes were on our older siblings, those of us too young for the X label got ignored. Then America went to war and we got ignored again. The only way to get anyone to notice you, it seems, is to go overseas and get shot or blown up.

Here we are, waiting for someone to tell us what to do next. Here we are, loaded to the gills with diplomas and degrees and licenses that we aren't using and that we never needed anyway, and we just want someone to tell us what to do. But when you're thirty no one tells you what to do. They all expect you to know, though. We're expected to know how to be good employees, good moms and dads. No one ever set those examples for us. We don't know where we're going, let alone how to get there.

Maybe it's just me, but that's what I see everywhere I look.