I know. You’re thinking, "What? Another stupid bit about Generation X? I’m so sick of…" yeah, yeah, I know. But hey, we all love to discuss what we’re sick of, and besides, I’m going to try to be interesting. The fact that my generation’s name has graced the Nineties as one of the decade’s hottest topics amuses me. Time magazine analyzes it. Witty youth ministers christianize it as Generation Cross or Generation eXtraordinary, etc. Everyone agrees it describes youth without purpose (ie: most of your friends), most of whom are sick of talking about it.

Of course it doesn’t matter that Generation X originally defined college kids in the early Nineties, and not us middle school kids who cared more about blowing up Sadaam Hussein in 1991 than our life’s purpose. Of course that definition got ditched a while ago, because the term now applies to anyone over twelve years old, especially those of us who grew up in less than ideal homes and happen to like music about hopeless anger.

Perhaps I am alone, but I don't believe our current "addiction to sadness" (as Don Chaffer of the band Waterdeep puts it) merits a title because it's not just our generation's problem. As the baby-boomers turned rebellious hippies turned "responsible adults" have taken the reins of society, they've had to grapple with the monster they created by smoking weed and streaking at Woodstock instead of growing up. Consequently composed of far too many overgrown children, many of them have transferred their own immaturity to their kids. Now that the flower children find out that making their own rules results in dysfunctional families, they preach, "Do as I say, not as I did." Obviously, no one believes them, since all the schools teach us to decide our own morals. Besides, President Clinton "didn't inhale" and he didn't do so bad in life. If he's the most powerful man in the world, why can't today's teenagers smoke a little dope?

When this natural progression in ideology culminates in suicidal twenty-somethings, society, hard pressed for a scapegoat so it can evade responsibility (we’re all victims, whimper, whimper), resorts to a name that can't even scrounge up a letter of the alphabet with good self-esteem (how many words other than Xylophone do you know that begin with X?). What makes our "new" name sadly hilarious is the amount of media hype given to it. Generation Xer's and Neo-Puritans alike love to lament everyone’s sad, sad state of affairs. They talk about it endlessly. They "kill" it. They call it a lie of the devil and an anthem of causeless rebels.

Of course, you're probably just now wondering why I wrote all this if I'm so sick of Generation X. Much as I think it's a stupid name, the problems it represents simply aren't going to go away. For all the pity it inspires, it simply throws blame for a moral dilemma over on one segment of society - mine. However, Generation X isn't some new, hip group of teenagers; it's just an excuse to put all the blame on the young for problems the old deal with too.

A man I respect once said, "Don't ever let anyone stereotype you, because then they can control you... they can put you in a box." Once something is controlled in a box, it can be written off by people who say, "Look here pal, that’s not my problem. I wear a suit and make $50,000 a year." Everyone wants to blame the kids for living out the ideals society taught them, a society maintained by the former hippies who blame it for their own problems. To evade responsibility (something all us "victims" are darn good at), everybody stereotypes the youth with a name. Kids are sick of it. I'm sick of it. The surviving twenty-somethings the name was meant for are quietly trying to sneak around to the other side of the pointing finger.

We, as a society, can no longer deny the problems we’ve tried to get rid of by quarantining them to the young. Emptiness, abused emotions, and hopelessness aren't just the teenagers' problems. Most of us think we’ve dealt with them, especially the forty-somethings who've finally made $50,000 to cover up the holes in their hearts. But, when being once abused, twice divorced, and thrice laid becomes increasingly normal with all ages, then something is seriously wrong.

Still, we keep teaching our youth, and forcing ourselves to believe, the ideals that are destroying our lives; like a mother bird vomiting worms to her babies, we’re feeding our children the same trash that we have been eating for thirty years and that is bringing our society to it’s knees. It's time to stop believing proven lies, one of the greatest being that our young generation deserves to be written off with a meaningless label, the scapegoat for everyone else’s problems on top of their own.

Funny thing is, young and old, we're all really fed up with meaninglessness, but society's pride won't let it feed us Truth. I’m really, really sick of relative morality and a victim mentality being shoved down my throat. It didn’t work for mom and dad, hasn’t worked for me, and sure won’t for my children. Heck, it hasn’t even worked for the most powerful man in the world, as he grapples with scandal after scandal.