Lost Generation
For thirty years students have been complaining to me that ‘it was easy for you’: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. ‘We’ (the children of the ’80s, the ’90s, the ‘aughts’) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us - just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a ‘lost generation’.
(Tony Judt again in his wonderful cri de coeur Ill Fares the Land. Although I am not sure the punctuation is right in this paragraph, it does provide a perspective on the ‘occupy’ movement going on around the world. As I write, the movement is fizzling partly because expressing frustration alone doesn’t make an influential social movement.)
