Here is the second part of X Generation. Note that it is from Hana bbs. ##################### START ############################### Subject: Generation X (pt.2) (fwd) part 2 One of the most important elements missing from today's young people was taken for granted by previous generations: safety. If you are in your late tems or early twenties, you will probably be muttering to yourself, "Give me a break. I'm not afraid of life," which is the way one should think at this stage in life. But from my many interviews with people in the age-group my sense is that they are safety-obsessed. "Our parents grew up in the Fifties with external enemies: communism, the Bomb," said a college student in Los Angeles. "Our enemies are internal: drugs, guns, the widening gap between poor and elite, and lots more competition for jobs." What is the first thing young people ask about in job interviews today: What are the health benefits? When I asked a savvy focus group of New Yorkers in their mid-twenties, "How safe do you feel - about sex, money, relationships, marriage, street-violence, job security?" The response was urgent and unanious. "None of the above. Unsafe on all levels. At all times." And they have good reason. Their universe is not playground for experimentation but a corridor of epidemics they have to dodge befoer they even reach the door to adulthood. There is the epidemic in adolescent suicide (quadrupled in the last twenty-five years), the epidemic in teenage pregnancy (the United States has the highest rate of any country in the Western world), and the plague of AIDS that is spreading among adolesecnts. "People our age were forming their sexual identity with the understanding that we could die for our actions. No other generation has had to deal with this at the stage of our lives," said one particpant in a focus group. In the past people in peacetime don't have confront their perishability until at least their forties. The Vietnam Generation was faced with death in the living room night after night, and many young men had to give up their lives. Dying then in anti-war demonstrations and civil rights causes was seen as noble, but shocking still when it did happen. But for the young people of the so called X Generation in their early twenties, the kind of mortality they are grappling with is mostly menaingless. Some of their music relfects it, with its tabloid imagery and desparate energy, its chopped-up chords played at hyperfast tempo. Anger, despair, death, cynicism, and sarcastic expressions of life dominate the music of this generation. Although the HIV virus has not spread nearly as much in heterosexuals as it has among gays, heteros tend to be extreme in their reactions to the threat. Some stage their adolescent rebelion by refusing to practice safe sex - in denial of reality - while others are fearful enough to refrin from sex completely. Some say, "Sex outside of marital commitment is onyl full of fear and anxiety," like 25 year old professional working woman. Today's young people are forced to think about safety because the wolrd around them has become so much more unpredictable and violent. One in four American high school students carried a weapon to school in 1995. In the same year 37 percent of teen readers of USA TODAY said, "they do not feel safe in their schools." For black teenagers the primary peril is being shot to death; the toys that adults sell to children today load real bullets. White teens are more likely to use cars as weapons of self-destruction or to collaborate in a suicide. Remember that the shock greeted the demand by students at Brown University that their health service stock suicide pills in case of nuclear war? *more later...on racial stuff and stats... ############ END #####################