Defining a generation, Y, that is

Earlier this month, G.L. Hoffman of Boomer-blog What Would Dad Say (AKA WWDS) invited me to post regarding the events which will be attributed to shaping Gen Y. I’ve been kicking around ideas for several weeks. . . I am ready to respond.

The Events of 9/11

Ask any Boomer where they were the day Kennedy was shot, and you’ll hear an interesting story. Every one remembers the mundane details of their lives on a day that stung a generation.

For the older half of Gen Y, 9/11 is a similar experience. Each twenty something I know has a story. The father of a friend who quit his job at the Trade Center, after 20 years with a company, just weeks before the attack. Everyone in his professional inner circle for 20 years, dead. The guy whose fire fighter brother died running into the very same building thousands ran out of. The young woman who recalls watching the plumes of smoke in NYC from a NJ overpass, not 10 minutes from my family’s home.

I spent July thru December 2001 at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Due to the time zones I was 12 hours ahead and was already home in my TV-less apartment when the attacks occurred. On September 12th, I woke to a one-line e-mail from a college friend in Philadelphia. “The United States is falling down.” ?!?!

I headed to the nearest news stand to see newspaper after newspaper covered with graphic photographs of the towers aflame, the jumpers desperate to escape a firey death and images of the second plane crashing. There was no way I could go to class that day; instead, I spent the morning and afternoon in a Thresherman’s Bakery just past the edge of campus, where I watched commercial-free coverage of the attacks on their wide-screen television. The same footage looped over and over again, with little additional breaking news. The pictorial was broken by British and Australian citizens expressing their sympathies and commenting, “if it can happen in America. . .” My only break from the tv screen was an emergency meeting called for the roughly 500 Americans studying at the University of Melbourne; at least one student needed to get back to the States because a family member was missing.

In the days and weeks to follow, hundreds of well-wishers left flowers and other tokens at an impromtu memorial in front of the American embassy there. Every Australian who heard my accent wanted to know if I was from the NY area and was my family ok. Despite being from NJ, I was fortunate in that I had no personal losses on that day; other members of my home town community were not so lucky.

I spent time in the library digging through dusty books on American foreign policy to figure out who Osama Bin Laden was and why he’d promised retribution as far back as 1992. (To this day, it frustrates me to hear politicians parrot that terrorists are afraid of our freedom, because that attack was an act meant to draw attention to arrogant foreign policy that frequently ignores that cultures of other nations. It was a horrific, yet effective way of getting our attention.)

On January 1, 2002, my welcome home brought me to an airport teeming with armed military personnel and the realization that the 9/11 attack was just the beginning.

The Ubiquity of Technology

Earlier this year I attended a conference on college marketing. Ricky Van Veen, twenty something founder of CollegeHumor.com remarked that “We’re the first generation to use the Internet before we had sex.” The remark drew the intended laughs, but stop to think about that reality.

Today, children learn to use a computer before they learn to write their name. Cellphones, video games, PDAs, computers, downloads, social networks, wireless Internet access: all are an integral part of the world Gen Y is growing up in. For teenagers, the loss of a cellphone is akin to the loss of a limb; they are ever connected to their social circles. Technology makes us available 24/7; in turn, information and entertainment have joined the realm of instant gratification.

It’ll likely be years before we can truly evaluate the effects of a lifetime of technology that isolates us at the same time it brings us all together.

Election Season 2008

Youth involvement in politics has rebounded something fierce for this latest Presidential Election season. Young adults are turning out in record numbers across the nation, and are actively campaigning. Barrack Obama is frequently credited with the invigoration of Democratic youth, while Ron Paul was actually quite popular with young Republicans online. YouTube and MySpace joined the ranks of acceptable debate venues (again with technology), evidence that the political arena is embracing our demographic.

No matter who wins, I don’t expect young adults to fall back into life as usual. We’ve had a taste of what unity and activism can do. Democratic candidate Obama is inspiring us to believe change can start at the bottom and shift power. (Has anyone not seen the Yes We Can video put together by young entertainment professionals that went viral and was embraced by the Obama campaign? 5 years ago that kind of grassroots campaigning was just not possible.) Clinton has shown a woman can run just as fierce a campaign as any man.

Regardless of who takes earns the Presidency in the fall, Obama, Clinton, and McCain would each experience the youth movement in different ways. Gen Y found its voice this election season.

Beyond these trends and landmark event, I think we’ve yet to see what will define our Generation, a Generation with a profound sense of social responsibility and a Generation who does not accept “impossible” as a valid word in our dictionary. Yes, We Can.

Disclaimer: If you read my blog, you’ll find that I support Barrack Obama.

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