10 Years Ago

If you follow my Twitter account - and I know you do! - the link I posted to Tom Junod's article for Esquire must still be careening off the sharp edges inside your brain. It sure is in mine. If you're missing the link, here it is: http://tinyurl.com/2fgmwe

Junod's article is arresting. I've tried to think of other words, maybe a string of them, to describe what his words did to me some seven years after he wrote them, and I kept coming back to that word -- arresting. The story he told, told painfully through the frames and lives of others, took custody of my idle thoughts for a good two days. If you haven't read the article, read it. If you have read it, read it again. I've read it three times already.

But unlike Junod, I am not a journalist, and while his words were chosen from a certain time and space, mine come from a generational plane, and cannot help but look forward because I do.

I've written and talked a lot about the ways 9/11 impacted, influenced, and shaped my generation - the Millennials. And I've often thought that the impressions that indescribable day left will not truly become visible until my generation grows into full adulthood and fills the various positions of power. For the past decade, people of stature and voice have reconstructed the world based on their reaction to 9/11. But a reaction is one thing, a childhood is another. While our recent past and now current leaders have certainly been changed by 9/11, it is just that -- a change. They reevaluated, recalculated, and re-imagined the world, all done upon the foundation of a construction and experience absent of the solvent that was September 11, 2001. That starting point is miles apart from the experience that is solely the tale my generation. Instead, my generation did not react to 9/11. My generation is, first, a product of that day, marked by the confusion and uncertainty of a unforeseen twist in an otherwise predictable story. And we are, second, the answer and explanation, the coming-of-age tale that marks, where those that came before us couldn't, the break in the narrative. We aren't Chapter 2. We are a completely separate book.

While I fully supported Barack Obama in 2008, I chafed at how the media cast the support he received from the youth, i.e. Us. The messages of "hope" and "change" were certainly borne is his own mind and vision, but the enthusiasm with which those ideas were met by the young was cast, by the media, as simple youthful exuberance.
We were miscast.
Simple youthful exuberance is not novel to any generation. We all remember those moments of availability and the romance of what is possible. But "hope" and "change" have too often been cheapened, and at times it becomes easy to miss the jarring significance of what those words really mean. For my generation, Obama was not a sunny afternoon dream. This much should have been apparent to many of the older, observant commentators. After all, the youth vote is famously underwhelming.
Instead of rainbows and butterflies, what Obama meant to us was a chance to soothe the scar tissue, an opportunity to rise above - while never forgetting - the smoke and ash that defined the terms in our life's dictionary.

We Millennials have been called "Confident, Connected, Open to Change." We've also been called whiny, weak, and lazy.
We are neither.

While it may be difficult to describe us, we are no different than other indescribable things. In other words, we are defined by what we are not. And what we are not is this -- we are not like the rest of all the human beings currently inhabiting western liberal democracies because they have never lived through a moment, a day, a history like 9/11 in the way that we did - in the midst of the most transformative period of our lives.
For everyone else, 9/11 happened, and they changed.
For us, 9/11 happened.

We are the primer. Whenever you turn on the TV, or open your newspaper, you will hear or read about the new rules of the world, about how things are different than they were before, and why the view of the world should be this way, or that.
Remember that they aren't really talking about an idea or a strategy.

They're talking about us.