The Lost Generation
Is not a new concept. In fact it was also at a time of great turmoil on a social and political scale that the phrase was coined.
The Lost Generation
The term the Lost Generation was introduced by Gertrude Stein, a modernist American writer who made Paris her permanent home. As the story goes, Stein's auto mechanic was upset when his young employee did unsatisfactory work on her car. The mechanic reasoned that the young were all a lost generation, difficult to prepare for work or focus.
Ernest Hemingway, a friend of Gertrude Stein, made it a popular concept when he included it as an epigraph in his novel The Sun Also Rises. The Lost Generation, therefore, really referred to that group of men and women who came of age during World War I and who felt disillusioned in this unfamiliar post-war world.
As it relates to literature, the Lost Generation was a group of American writers, most of whom emigrated to Europe and worked there from the end of World War I until the Great Depression. So, America was filled with cynical people who were facing less than certain future, but why move across the ocean just to write? Well, many of these writers felt that their home and life could never be repaired, and that the United States that they knew was gone completely.
A bohemian lifestyle of travel among intellectuals felt far more appealing than remaining in a place where virtuous behavior no longer existed, faith in religion was broken, and a connection to morality was questionable at best. So, the expatriate writers living in Europe wrote about the trials and tribulations of this Lost Generation, while, interestingly enough, being a part of it themselves.
I too came of age as part of a lost generation. The
AIDS Crisis was roaring and no one but extremists were willing to challenge authority to save lives.
So I'm left with a mindset of no one will do it for us.
But there is our most recent crop of Lost Generation that has done all the right things and instead of finding their basic needs are cared for they are saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and have a slim chance of getting the paid position they are interning for for a cost of over two hundred dollars a month in commute costs alone.
In debt.
Working for free in hopes of being lucky enough to get a job that might pay a portion of your student loan payment after the compounding of interest begins to see results.
And completely and utterly smothering any dreams, entrepreneurial spirit or visions of creativity.
We Want Simple Luxuries Back
Whether it’s indulging in drugs, cigarettes or alcohol, we’re a generation that’s not afraid to bask in the indulgences of life.
We’ve come not only to normalize drug use, but to use it as a bonding tool. Pills, booze and weed are as normal and condoned as the tonics and morphine in the roaring 20s.
We just want to sit in cafés and smoke cigarettes. We want to drink wine during the day and go to bullfights under the hot, Spanish sun.
We want to eat well and dress well, basking in the simple luxuries that Americans have seemed to forget about. We want to spend weeks traveling the coast and meet new friends at every stop.
We want a life that’s not about the money, but the experiences. Dollar bills won’t define us, but the memories we make with them will. We don’t need expensive apartments and big cars. We don’t want the beach houses and yachts.
We want the freedom to leave when we want, be whoever we want and the peace of mind of knowing that we will not die in vain. We want the simple pleasures in the life, not the superficial ones.
These are not just whines about not having an x-box or other electronic toy of the month. But having the minimum of financial means to step into a cafe and grab a quick bite.
What this Lost Generation is up against is financial terrorism in the form of austerity. An austerity that wipes out jobs and leaves communities in ruins as they try and fund the various day to day responsibilities on budgets so slashed they might as well be a parody of what they should be.
There are many themes that Hemingway elaborates in The Sun Also Rises, and a detailed examination of all of them is not the purpose here. Suffice it to say that the main subject of a Lost Generation has contemporary relevance. There is another emerging lost generation in Europe, but not as a result of an intra-European war. There are no bombs exploding, or bullets flying, the suffering and social dislocation experienced by the today’s generation in Europe is no less real. The cause of another lost generation is a different kind of warfare; an economic experiment that condemns millions to impoverishment and daily suffering while enriching a tiny, exploitative minority. Humanitarian crises are certainly evident after a natural disaster, or prolonged warfare. But never before has human suffering been inflicted in slow-motion, economically piecemeal fashion as in capitalist Europe today.
The economic crisis of capitalism, having created a vast social pyramid of economic inequality, is now engulfing millions of Europeans as the main imperialist institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the European Central Bank, implement so-called ‘bailout’ packages, enforcing regimes of austerity on the general population. The millions will now pay for the ‘bailout’ in the form of cutbacks to social welfare, wages, working conditions, pensions, and in the latest case of Cyprus, their bank savings. Plundering the savings of what were supposed to be government-backed deposits from workers and pensioners in order to pay for the ‘bailout’ would be called bank robbery in any other country – and it is. When the European Central Bank and IMF impose policies that result in massive losses for long-term depositors and savers results in the spectre of a run on the banks – depositors hurriedly withdrawing their money, then the question has to be asked, in whose interest do the big banks and politicians govern?
Antipoverty plans that perpetuate stereotypes are what we are still being served. If you want to give this generation a map then creating laws and policy that suits their interests will be the only way they will read it.