by Evans Mehew

Rifling through Google News this morning, I saw numerous headlines reporting layoffs affecting corporations (HP, Timberland, T-Mobile USA, etc.) and local governments. Spring has sprung, and economic recovery beckons … safety and security for all is just around the corner.

Not.

As Americans in the 21st century, we (luckily) live in a society/culture that values education. It’s revered, sitting right up there with other pillars of our society, such as American Idol, Facebook and Angry Birds. One might argue that the pursuit of education should be a lifelong mindest and worldview, rather than a set activity for a specific amount of time whose tangible output is a piece of paper … but never mind about that. For now, we’ll just focus our attention upon the piece of paper. Full story »

Rachel Held Evans nails it:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

…

My generation is tired of the culture wars.  Full story »

My alma mater, Wake Forest University, has a “career connectors” group on LinkedIn, and there’s currently a thread where one of the university’s career dev folks asks for some input on a project she’s working. Specifically, she asks: “If you were hiring a recent graduate, what top five professional skills do you want him/her to possess to be a strong candidate in your profession?”

Great question. Since I’m all in favor of young Deacons taking the world by storm, I thought I’d try to contribute some advice. Here’s a slightly buffed out version of what I wrote.

1: Develop communications skills. Especially the ability to write clearly and flawlessly. The erosion of writing skills over the past 20 years has been dramatic, and a student who can demonstrate this ability has a huge advantage over the competition. A warning, though. Full story »

by Matt Gallagher

I slept through 9/11.

When people hear or read that statement, they tend to think I’m speaking metaphorically. “Ahh,” they say. “Weren’t we all?” While I do appreciate my words being consumed as literary insight, and there’s certainly a great deal of truth to that particular interpretation, I mean that as literally as possible. As in, I was drooling on my pillow after staying up too late playing video games during my first week of college when my roommate, a native New Yorker, woke me up in time to watch the South Tower collapse.   Full story »

Two flimsy gray walls, three filing cabinets and one rarely used dry-erase board make up the landscape of my work cubicle. My mind travels often to places I have been and those I long to see, yet this is the daily scenery starving my adventurous soul.

I used to love my job. That was before it became three positions in one.

Since corporations began laying off millions during the economic crisis several years ago, there’s a phrase that’s became all-too-common. Somebody complains about work. Somebody else replies that, “At least you have a job.” Full story »

by Tom Shortell

I was scrawny, zit-faced sophomore sitting in Spanish 2 Honors when Principal Abatemarco informed my high school what had happened in Lower Manhattan the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The school is a 50-mile drive from where the towers stood, and everyone knew someone that never came home that day. My hometown of Middletown, NJ lost 37 people in the attacks, the highest amount of any city outside of New York. Full story »

Part two in a series.

Forgive me for abstracting and oversimplifying a bit, but one might argue that American politics breaks along the following 10 lines:

• Social Conservatives
• Neocons
• Business Conservatives
• Traditional Conservatives (there’s probably a better term, but I’m thinking of old-line Western land and water rights types)
• Blue Dog Democrats
• New Democrats
• Progressives Full story »

by Lisa Barnard

I’ll say it. I hate New Year’s Resolutions. Mostly because, let’s be honest, I either forget about them after about a month (…okay, a week) or am just such a complete failure at them that it just destroys my already tenuous self-esteem.

But also, it’s just annoying, really. It reminds me of the type of people I don’t like. The ones who get up at 5am every day just for kicks, and by 6am have gone to the gym, read the paper, cooked and fed their kids breakfast, ran a marathon, meditated, went to a hot yoga class and shoveled six driveways. Full story »

The arrival of The Beatles in February of 1964 and the subsequent cultural changes they fostered (whether consciously or not) paralleled momentous changes in the American social and political landscape. From 1964-70 Boomers found themselves awash in powerful cultural currents coming from, it seemed, every direction:

• The civil rights movement, which had reached its zenith with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial after the March on Washington in 1963 had seen some fruition in the passage of landmark legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. But that movement had begun to move in a more radicalized direction, partly as a result of police brutality. Even as a “loyal opponent” such as Malcolm X was assassinated by members of his own religion, younger, Boomer-aged black leaders emerged such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton calling for a new approach to race relations that reflected more the beliefs of Malcolm X rather than Dr. King – an approach based on a concept they called “black power.” Full story »

The Boomer generation’s view of war and the purposes of war was and is the result of United States involvement in Vietnam. Unlike subsequent generations, Boomers (at least males and  tangentially females) were directly touched by the conflict. And almost every Boomer, male or female, is drawing upon memories of how Vietnam divided our generation from our parents.  And, how its memory eventually divided our generation and our nation against itself. Whether Boomers participated in the war, protested against, the war  tried to avoid the war, or later turned radical (either liberal or conservative), it almost all came in response to memories of Vietnam.

During the summer of 1964, while most Boomers were tweens and teens awe struck with Beatlemania or dancing their little hearts out to that Motown sound, LBJ and his military advisers were trying to find a way to increase America’s presence in South Vietnam. LBJ, despite his better angels (he was pushing the Voting Rights Act and other important civil rights legislation through Congress and his “Great Society” was already on the  drawing board  – Medicare/Medicaid, Head Start, VISTA, anyone?) had bought LeMay and Westmoreland’s bullshit about the communist threat in SE Asia and the need to “save” South Vietnam to prevent a “domino effect” of government overthrows by communists in countries such as Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Full story »

Ceci n’est pas Pink #@#@^&%$ Floyd…

Historians often argue that dates should not be the focus of history. Hell, much of the last quarter century has been dominated by intellectuals arguing that history doesn’t matter.

To understand the Boomers, however, it’s essential to focus on both history and significant dates in history. Truth is, two dates in the personal histories of Boomers matter so much as to have become mythic:

• November 22, 1963: Boomers lose the president they most closely identify with, John F. Kennedy, to an assassin’s bullet;
• February 9, 1964: The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, on television (see Boomers, part 2 for discussion of  TV’s validating power) and proceed to take the generation by storm, unleashing pent up emotion and energy that will spin out of control over the next ten years and change America profoundly – for both good and ill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah…. Full story »

America’s First Family, Boomer parents’ edition

The Boomers are the first TV generation. We’ve been intimates of television since its infancy as the mass medium of choice for Americans.

Because of television’s limited options in those days, most Boomers, at least as children, lived with fewer than 6 channels and only 3 networks (although there were nascent public television systems, many viewers were unable to receive their signals).  There was also the old Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters. This set limits on the material presented on TV – and also served, good or ill, as a unifier of messages.

We Boomers learned a lot from television. TV was  quasi parent/sibling/best friend during the maturation of the majority of Boomers.  Families watched TV together – and the messages of television programming were designed with families both as subject – and as message.  The early years of Boomer television watching were dominated by shows with wise (if often exasperated)  fathers, nurturing ( if occasionally scatter-brained) mothers, and children who learned lessons. Boy Boomers and Girl Boomers received different lessons – both from the shows’ texts and from their subtexts. But lessons there always were.

Gee, Wally…. Full story »

“In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.” Who said it? Full story »

Not Mr. Jones….

Everything starts somewhere.

This series of posts starts from a thoughtful post by Sara Robinson over at Campaign for America’s Future that our colleague Russ Wellen alerted us to. This sparked some discussion among the writers for this blog and led to a passing comment by our esteemed Dr. Slammy that made me see red – and write an email that I never sent:

It’s a great piece and fundamentally right on so many points. The odd irony, of course, is that the upstart educated middle class rampaging through the streets in the ’60s turned out to be the most able cohort of would-be aristocrats in US history.

If there’s one meme that pervades A LOT of blogosphere chatter (both here at S&R and elsewhere), it’s one that goes something like this:

Boomers have fucked everything up and now we’re all going to hell in a hand basket and it’s the Boomer generation’s fault over under sideways down… Full story »

“OMG!” I thought. There, on the website of the Gray Lady — a moniker attached to The New York Times for its past penchant for words over photographs — was a headline I never expected to see:

“Snowboard Videos: Send Us Your Tricks”

“How dare The Times stoop to such pandering to an unseemly demographic,” I harrumphed. Snowboard tricks? In The Times? How could my principal source of serious news by serious people about serious issues and events sink to pandering to the fans of fakie? This is unthinkable.

Beginning Feb. 12, The Times will open a website to host these videos. But why on earth (or snow) would The Times want snowboard videos? I mean, gee whiz, this could amount to amateur night among the heathens. The Times does things right — you know, professionally done photography, video, graphics and other illustrations. What gives with wanting videos likely to be of goofy-footers eatin’ snow?
Full story »

If you’ve been off-planet for the last few months you may have missed the news: Jon & Kate have split, and in the process migrated from the relative banality of the TV listings over to the hyper-banality of the tabloids. I’m still not sure what the future holds for the popular “reality” show, but whatever it is, Gosselin family 2.0 equals Jon minus Kate.

It occurs to me that these events represent something significant in our culture. Since about 1980 or so we’ve been in one of our periodic “childrens is the most preciousest things in the whole wide world” phases. (For more on the generational cycles that produce this dynamic, see Generations, 13th Gen and Millennials Rising by William Howe and Neil Strauss, two men whose work I have referenced a number of times in the past.) In the previous generation (Gen X), children were an afterthought for most parents, who had been socialized in far more self-centric times. Full story »

Part two in a series

How did it happen? Why did it happen? There’s simply no way to measure how many hours have devoted to these questions in the ten years and four days since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, and while we don’t (and never will) have all the answers, we do have some of them. Obviously a good bit of the discussion focuses on the individuals themselves, and other analyses cast a broader net, examining the social factors that shaped the individuals. In a way, the question we’re still debating perhaps boils down to nature vs. nurture. Were Harris and Klebold Natural Born Killers? Or are they better understood as by-products of deeper social trends and dynamics?

The answer is probably “All of the above,” but we can’t simply check C and be on our merry, uncritical way. Full story »

Part one of a series

April 20, 2009: 11:19 am MDT

Ten years ago a co-worker turned to me and said something that I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live: “Hey, Sammy, there’s been a school shooting in Littleton.”

Since that day a great deal has been written and said about Columbine High School and the events of 4.20.99, and like a lot of other people I’ve tried my hardest to make sense of something that seemed (and still seems) inherently senseless. Tried and failed. Now, ten years on, the grief hasn’t fully dissipated here in the city that I have come to call home, and even if we manage to understand the whos, whats, and hows, there’s a part of us that’s doomed to wrestle forever with the whys. Full story »

Like a lot of other people, I watched the Watchmen this past weekend.

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. Full story »

Dear Mr. Buffet, Mr. Gates, Mr. Turner, Mr. Soros, Ms. Winfrey, and any other hyper-rich types with progressive political leanings:

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
_______________

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US. Full story »