What are we Fighting for?

It's a good line, "what are we fighting for." I never realized it's a pun. What are we fighting to gain, and why are we fighting? I'll pose it this way. Why do we fight wars? What are we hoping to protect? In this blog I'm going to stop shirking my responsibilities as the "voice of my generation" (thunder clap). That's right, I'm gonna take off my shirk, and slip into something nice.

(PS. I think being a voice of one's generation is a misguided notion. The generation is so wide and full of voices that it's impossible and immoral to single out one person and his or her opinions as speaking for others. Lord knows that blogs were created by people who didn't want others to speak for them).

I was reading a cute article on the New York Times this morning called "who's bed is it" (awww shit, hyperlink). The article is sweet. It's about children who sleep in their parents beds. My question for you, home boys and girls, is where are we going? Not in the grand scheme, but rather in terms of, "where are people who are 20-25" headed, socially, in America?

Can you imagine, at this point if your life, living in a sweet, posh Manhattan brownstone with your husband/wife and kids? Can you imagine having to be 35 and deal with the issues of not getting enough sleep because your kids are climbing into bed with you? The lives of the people in the article are well kept, affluent and busy. The parents come home from a long day at work exhausted and get to spend a few hours at best with their spouse. When bed time comes around, it's possible that if the parents want to "parent" they have to spend 1-2 hours in the middle of the night telling their kids that they can't sleep in their beds. On nights when they're really tired, they don't do parenting and they let their kids sleep where they want.

Culturally, according the article, this happens as a sort of "backlash" from the young parents of today having such strict boundaries from their parents. The lives of these parents are busy, hectic, wealthy, and they don't seem to have enough to time to really parent, and declare boundaries for their children. On any level, can you imagine this being your life? And what about the kids...what becomes of them?

What do you imagine your life being like? Perhaps you're so focused on what you're doing now that you can't concentrate on the 10 years from now, and that's fine. It is interesting to think about it though because time is slipping up on us quicker every year (as it would be wont to do). But think about living a life where you're the center of attention, where you have your degrees from you highly touted academic institutions and you have your nice job (and as days go by...water rolling under grou...) and all of that suddenly takes a back seat to your second life. Having kids is like the playoffs. You've played the game before, but it's a whole new ball game now.

It's going to have to start coming up - those notions of where our generation, people our age, are going, and what are values are. What is our art going to be about, what are our politics? Are we going to be the parents with kids, and no love lives or intimacy, are we going to be those fast powered adults who hit the clubs and the bars until our early 40s, are we going to be the work-a-holics, the locals, the jet setters, the ones trying to figure our lives out, or we going to be caught in a state of arrested development ?(hey that's the name of the show)

There's a notion if fantasy storytelling of the loss of something from the past. It's not fantasy, it's a nightmare...well, a nightmare fantasy.

Big ups to Brooklyn