Maybe the title says it all! Or maybe the title just says I'm having trouble being concise today.
If you think about the premise you'll see the analogy holds, and that it doesn't speak well of today's youth. Older generations are called "conservative" because they long for a time when issues that are important to them were headed in a direction more to their liking. Same for the younger generation, but what things are important to them? Fashion and music.
It's unfortunate, but most young people are ignorant and uneducated (mostly due to the public school system, which is a failure by their parents). They don't know much about politics or social policy, and they don't much care what changes because they're ready to buy into whatever soundbite spews from the face-hole of their American Idol.
But when it comes to things they know and care about -- however shallow those things may be -- the gradually aging Gen-Xers pine for the recent past of their high school glory days in the early 1990s.
I'd rather forget the early 1990's!
Didn't most Gen-Xers go to school in the late eighties? Was there a fashion to the early 90's outside of the "grunge" look, ill-fitting pants, hiking boots and four days worth of chin stubble? All I seem to remember of the early 90's was Starbuck's displacing Haagen-Daz as the fashion du jour, an explosion in cell phone usage, forest green being a fashionable car color and for some unknown reason lots of BMW 325's driving all over the place on their way to see a Winona Ryder film.
More importantly, when did the 90's grunge look really leave us? In many parts of the country the youth seem stuck in a bad rap/Nirvana hybrid fashion timewarp that shows no signs of evolution. Hoping such fashions leave us is like hoping Madonna would retire.
It's rooted more in fantasy than reality. ;-)
SDAI: I'm a Gen-Xer and I was in high school from '90-'94. As I remember the '90s, or at least the early '90s, there were still very few cell phones, the "World Wide Web" and "Information Super Highway" were things we'd heard of but not been able to experience yet, virtual reality seemed like the next big "sport" all from the convenience of your living room and I was driving around to see Jim Carrey movies, not Winona Ryder ones. The fashion no longer was skin-tight jeans but for those not into grunge, you still made sure you had nothing closeto the flaring sleeves and bell-bottoms of the '70s (*shudder*). I also remember a few years after I graduated and my sister (who's Gen-Y) was in high school that, unlike her, I had never really had to worry about guns being brought to school or going through a medal detector every morning.
We had a few attempted drug busts in high school but considering one kid wrote "My Happy Drugs" on a burlap bag and put baking soda and oregano in Ziplock bags inside of it then stuck it in his locker, it seems funny.
Oops! My computer was re-loaded today and I didn't realize my name wasn't being added to my posts.
Oops! My computer was re-loaded today and I didn't notice it wasn't adding my name to my posts. I posted the above comment.