“Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were essentially critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and rational one. Once institutionalized, these rights and liberties shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement, cancels the premises.” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

One speaks freely at all times? No. One expresses oneself with full honesty at all times under any given circumstances? No. So, what the f*** are we all talking about? We speak of freedom, we speak of rights, we speak of progress through their enhancement in our society. But we have manipulated them. We have shredded them to fit our view of things, to fit into the massive objective of our industrial society with its goal set on the illusion of purchasable happiness. We are liars, sheer liars by nature. Is it human? Yes. Is it ethical? Who gives a f***, honestly?
In a world of mass-production, in a world dominated by speed and consume, in a world deconstructed to its nakedness and yet not uncovered at all from its human contingency, we cannot see through the others, we can’t even see through ourselves anymore. We are deep inside walls, inside mind-cells that are being built around us and we don’t even realize it, we just lay the bricks not knowing we are caging ourselves, blindly following the instructions on the box, and by it, caging the whole of humanity. We are building ourselves a trap from which we cannot escape, we cannot avoid it. This century is the wasteland of the past century. We are the children of Vietnam vets, of NASA engineers, of reformed hippies and drunken Irish outlaws. We are the dreams of a whole nation that’s been dead for decades.
So where do we stand? Should we acknowledge our condition? S***, should we put a bullet through our brains? The past century had a chance at realizing its mistakes, its condition. Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Kerouac, Malraux, Marcuse, they all said f*** it, the rest is bulls***, the only important thing right here, right now, is Man and the true welfare of the Human Condition, that’s all that matters to us. The students at Prague and Paris and Mexico in 68’, the youth protesting against the war in the United States, they had the last spark from the flame. They knew what they wanted and fought for it.
Do we know what we want? And by knowing, are we willing to fight for it? Are we willing to make a change in our lives? Are we willing to revert the situation strewn upon us by generations and generations and make ourselves worthy of our place in society? Are we going to succumb to the age of consumerism? Are we going to destruct society into a digital and artificial media of mass communication based on technological advancement over our own humanism? Are we gonna let ourselves be dominated by money and consumerism? Are we going to be the youth that fought and made a change, or are we going to be the youth that too conformed with their lives, their social situation and status and their welfare couldn’t stood up because of mere fear?
Throughout history the cultural explosions of the world have shifted and divided in ways and manners and placements myriad and varied. These generations had their moments, their own timings, their own impetus and their own achievements and failures. They were measured and calculated, torn and shattered by their following generations. Those generations did their exegetic of their cultural pasts and drove themselves to correct that past and fill it with the contingency of reality and actuality of their moment in History. There was the Lost Generation dragging themselves from the shores of the XIX century into the Great War trenches and the Parisian boulevards; there was the Silent Generation confused and messed up in a messed up world, not yet high but on its way there, cold and nuclear; there was the Baby Boom Generation making love in the U.S, making revolution in Europe, making babies and making equality; there was the Generation X, a swirl of teenage angst and MTV, grunge and the rise of Seattle as a wave destined to crush it all; and now there is this so called Generation Y. We are this Generation Y, the remnants of the X. We are not even a name self-made and righteously given: we are a continuation; we are the sequel everybody hates, made just to gain an extra buck, to fill the empty spaces the previous left unfilled. That is why we have to make our place in History. We don’t have to be the completeness of that which was left incomplete; we have to be Completeness itself. We don’t have to be the thing that set together the torn pieces of a smashed crystal, the crooked ruins of that which was left unresolved, we have to be the Oneness that constitutes the Togetherness. For now we are the Incomplete, the Separate, the Consumers and the Buyers. For now we are the leftovers of the 90’s.
We are the New Youth. We are the remaining ashes. We are the ashtray that’s been pilling up for a hundred years. It is up to us to decide whether we want to be reborn from them, or just drown on our own inevitable demise and be the meaningless gap between the generation preceding us and that of the future.