Word: 80s
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...heard it before? The alleged slogan of the "younger generation" is "MAKE BUCKS, NOT LOVE." The younger generation is marked by materialism, "somberness," and "deglandularization." We have no passion. We have no idealism. We have no politics. Last week, Michael Blumenthal joined the ever-growing consensus that all us '80s kids are unromantic, apathetic, "dollar-sniffing" jerks...
...start with Shakespeare: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" is one of the more romantic lines of the more romantic sonnets of Shakespeare. Blumenthal uses the line as a possible theme for the '80s generation, one that refuses to idealize love and lovers. The poem goes on to list a variety of perfect qualities the mistress (or possibly, male lover) does not have...
...responsible for the incredible increase of poverty in the '80s; however, we are trying to do something about it. While '60s-style, one-weekend demonstrations have declined in frequency, the amount of volunteer work Harvard students do has increased about 500 percent in the last 25 years...
...want to fall into the trap of saying that the '60s generation was really a selfish, flashy, repressed, hypocritical one, and that the '80s generation is full of sweetness and light. Many of us don't see our world as the best of all possible ones, just like many of the '60s generation didn't see theirs as perfect either...
What I object to is the idea that an entire generation born in 1968 and after are all self-serving snobs, while the generation born in the 1950s are all altruistic angels. The habit of generation-naming has become so widespread as to be harmful. Characterizing the '80s as the age of greed totally effaces the behind-the-scenes, unpublic sacrifices made by, for example, child abuse workers, drug counselors, AIDS-hotline staffers, soup-kitchen servers...