Laziness, immaturity, selfishness: just three of the many erroneous labels pinned to our generation. South Park, Britney Spears, Eminem: just a few of the major icons and misnomers. The hipness of Generation X has come and gone, and those of us left behind receive nothing but inadequate representation. Even the new tag line of our generation, the millenials, comes from a trite, overly expressive and underly thought-out catch phrase of the media and advertisers. Even Pepsi is too apathetic to give us a Spice Girls commercial. The accusations sound the same, with minor details changed to protect the egos of generations past. pegged as foul-mouthed, disrespectful teeny-boppers. Our generation has been pegged screaming, sign-toting fans of poppy boy and girl bands whose fifteen minutes expired about three years ago. All our signs are the same, and those perfect, made up, false expectations of realized teen dreams will not marry any of us. They realized their dream, we failed, and will continue to fail. We used to wear our Beavis and Butt-head shirts, which we sold to buy the latest "I want my cheesy poofs" ringer at Spencer�s Gifts. We are all insane by virtue of the fact that our T-shirt has a catch phrase involving schizophrenia or where we buried our dead bodies when, in actuality, we buried our own dead bodies in the minds that MTV has given to us. Our pseudo-insanity leads the socially unaccepted and inadept to confuse themselves into being truly disturbed. We supposedly kill kids at schools with semi-automatic weapons because Duke Nukem told us to. Gangs have become passe, and our old philophy of "everything is someone else�s fault" has long since been replaced with "everything is my fault."
And, to think, cetain outlets of the media are actually blaming television for our generation�s problems. Television, namely MTV, only fuels us�we decide our own actions, and face those consequences. We�ve had television long before the unprecedented 16 school shootings in the last five years. The market for violent cinema and television is almost 3 times as profitable as it is in America, yet Japan has had no record of school slayings ever. Well it�s good, at least, to see that our millenial friends from Japan aren�t killing each other.
The simple truth is that a generation cannot be categorized into certain uniform similarities. Most of us have never once held up a marriage proposal to Christina Aguilera on three by three poster board. I can�t recall the last time I saw a South Park shirt, and I know of no one involved with school shootings. Yet, all these accusations came from somewhere. These things do happen. It�s a simple matter of principle. And let�s not blame our parents for our own mistakes. I don�t ever remeber Ted Bundy�s mother being put under media scrutiny for the atrocities of her son. Who knows, maybe she should have been?
So what do we do? How should we be labeled? It�s simple when given some thought: We need to evaluate our lives and think for ourselves. We need to grow up, turn off the television, and witness life first hand, without sex and violence clogging the track from the retina to the brain. We are of the earth, and we need to experience the earth in its many forms; from simple to complex. We need to quit wasting our own time with the trivial, insignificant aspects of a falsely entertaining vision. Our time is the only thing that can�t be retrieved. We know what we need to do, but choose not to because we fear change, and we fear ourselves, and we fear ridicule. Well here�s a real fear: to exit this planet without loving it; to die with no feeling of accomplishment.
Yet we sit by the way-side, waiting for an answer to our problems. We walk the tight-rope of life in a demoralizing fashion, remaining unperturbed by our slow brainwashing. We sit in front of our televisions, with a falsly orgastic smile that hides our true feelings. Underneathe the surface, where the true marrow lies, we�ve sucked in everything the media has told us. We fear our lives and our sanity. We fear becoming that square businessman whom we�ve vowed to hate. We think about the state of the world when it is handed to us, and it�s state when we hand it to the next generation, much like the inside cover of an algebra book�Issued: Good, Returned: Poor.
But these thoughts are scrambled by our alarm clock in the morning that wakes us for school. "I hope I don�t get shot today."