The New Lost Generation

The New Lost Generation

Lost generations tend to come and go. They generally get lost, find their way and themselves, and move on in life. The most lost, of course, never do find an exit and remain in the Valley of the Lost for most or all of their existences.

At the risk of overly dramatizing the situation, America is experiencing what some are calling a new lost generation, a generation which is unique in that the plight of the affected is not only not of their own making but shows no signs it will end in their lifetimes.

The original “Lost Generation” of post-World War One, the era of the Jazz Age when writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos and a various others began to express their jaded views of life and society in their novels, was supplanted by various lost pretenders but today we have a unique breed.

They are lost not because of emotional and physical injuries wreaked on them by war or by the drug culture or other factors but by a national economy which has yet to reflect any substantive recovery from what is now being termed the “Great Recession” chiefly as an excuse for the failed policies visited upon them by President Barack Hussein Obama and the Federal Reserve.

Nevertheless, lost or not, the young in entreprenurial America have something going for them their elders do not, their youth from which hope springs eternal.

Ron Brownstein capsulized the root issue of the dilemma facing the new lost generation in his article, “Upside Down,” subtitled, “Why millennials can’t start their careers and baby boomers can’t end theirs” in the National Journal: “It’s hard to say this spring whether it’s more difficult for the class of 2011 to enter the labor force or for the class of 1967 to leave it.” In brief, the Boomers can’t retire so the Millenials can’t take their jobs. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4790)

Baby Boomer Nostalgia

Baby Boomer Nostalgia

This emailed trip down 1950s Memory Lane is a welcome relief from the world of 2011. Boring old Dwight Eisenhower was president back then and, though the Fifties weren’t free of conflict, they pre-dated Vietnam, assassinations, Woodstock and the other events and happenings which turned America’s world upsidedown, a disorientation from which our country has yet to recover and which seems to grow more disorienting by the day. The 1950s weren’t a perfect era but they were a much simpler era, a period in the life of the nation those of whom lived it cherish–and wish our kids and grandchildren could re-live. That wish can never be fulfilled except in dreams so, for now, take a trip down our Memory Lane even if your lanes came later. If you’ve already seen and read it, see and read it again if for no other reason than to realize America was once much different than it is today.
(Read "The Land That Made Me, Me" here: http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3944)