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Generation Zero

January 18, 2009

My Gen Zero contemplating the adantage of nothingness

As we near the end of the decade I am curious how we will refer to the early 2000 years.

I often hear music or political movements lumped into decades, eighties night at the danceclub (Why?), the swinging sixties, the roaring twenties...

But I'm not sure what to call these past ten years. It doesn't seem like much has changed in terms of music or fashion.   The sounds on the radio don't sound much different to me now than they did in the nineties, and I often see junior high students wearing the same types of outfits that we wore when I was that age...nearly two decades ago.

Until recently it didn't seem that much was happening politically either.  The Iraq war was compared to Vietnam, except where were the young people? We heard that they weren't voting, we didn't see them protesting, they seemed to be zombified into some sort of consumeristic haze of dressing up, eating out, drinking heavily and shopping.

Or maybe that's just what the media would have us believe, and I'm sure it depended on what college campus you were on.  Either way, there wasn't enough noise being made, and I was beginning to give up hope.  And then came Obama.  And the change/hope campaign.  And suddenly young people were making a difference.  Quietly.  On the internet.  And it became clear that it wasn't that the college kids didn't care, they just weren't leaving their rooms enough to be visible to the outside world.

So as we hit the tens, will we look back fondly at the "O's"?  Will we have O themed parties, 0 danceclub nights? Will we talk about the 0 revolution?

I wonder also because my son, and all of his cousins, were born in this decade.  Will they become the zero generation? On the one hand, there is a negative connotation to the sound,  as if such a generation would be expected to accomplish nothing. On the other hand, starting at zero is not a bad place to be. Zero is a neutral number, neither good nor bad. You don't have anything with zero, but then again, you aren't in the negative either.

Perhaps the zero generation will start a zero revolution.  What if we could all go back to zero?  What if all of the countries and all of the banks and all of the credit card companies in the world agreed to go back to zero?  What if we could all just wake up one day and not have any debt, and start over from the beginning?  Starting with zero may not actually be such a bad idea after all...

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