We’re children of the 90’s. We’re the troubled, therapy inhabiting, and anti-chain-smoking generation. We’ve been smothered by our parents all our lives with words like love, dream, and believe. We’re the generation that’s fought obesity and lost, idolized celebrities like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan. We read Cosmopolitan Magazine, spend hundreds of dollars on designer handbags, and think we’re smart because we’ve seen the great classics in their film versions. We’re sloppy and can’t fully appreciate what a real struggle is because our biggest climbs have been from ledges not summits.
We believe in love, peace, and consumerism because those words sound nice, not because we know what they really mean. We will vote for the first black president of the United States because we hate Bush. We’re not really sure why we hate him other than the reason that everyone else does too. We’re over-dramatic, crazed, Riddilen-induced young adults.
We are the most educated generation with the least amount of real life experience. We have multiple degrees and shiny stamps of intelligence gleaming on our diplomas, but we’re unsure of why it’s necessary to separate whites from darks in the washing machine. We think our parents know nothing and we’re dead set on believing that when we get out of college, we’ll make so much more money than they ever did.
Our parents pay for our frivolous lifestyles and we scorn their lack of depth. While they fund our worldwide excursions, we drink up the vodka that comes with life in a foreign country where the drinking age is much lower. We’ve been offered almost every drug under the sun and there were times we remembered what we learned in D.A.R.E. and others when we chose to ignore it.
We spend hours in the sun perfecting our bronze glow and make frequent trips to boutiques where they cut our nails and paint them. We want to be Carrie Bradshaw in her Manolo Blahniks prancing the streets of Manhattan with Mr. Big on one arm and our three best friends on the other.
We’ve lost religion and God. We’ve learned to question everything, to be progressive and critical thinkers. So we spend hours at the bars discussing religion, spiritual awareness and what lies beyond our own mortality looking for the answers to our questions and debating with whomever will offer a differing opinion.
We call ourselves artists, but we lost our imagination when our parents sat us in front of the TV to shut us up. So we recreate masterpieces and hope for the best and sometimes it turns into Picasso’s Las Meminas, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes to find that artistic edge we venture to a dark place within us that screams for the world to know that we exist beyond our plastic, consumer-driven, college-degree holding selves. And when that part of us emerges, it isn’t always pretty.
Sometimes we are the most tragic beings of all. Because our spoiled lives have wronged us in the worst kind of way. Some of us will end up broken, middle-aged nobody’s, milking the Prozac and hoping for someone to really challenge us. And some of us will find glory and become successful, middle-aged robots just looking to afford the mortgage. We are the children of the 90’s.
