Voip
Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Brotherhood. Pragmatism and the emergence of compassion. All of these are regularly used to define a generation. Unfortunately, not mine. Episodes and collective experiences are the cogs which forever turn the wheels of cultural characterization, and my generation simply hasn’t had enough of either of these to characterize and define us.
There are only a few real circumstances and events which have had an influence on my peers and me. On Thursday November 9th, 1989, the long divide which had separated two halves of humanity, came tumbling down with the fall of the Berlin Wall. On that day, we became the first generation to grow up without the mutual assurance of destruction, and within the longest period of economic prosperity and security since the roaring age of the speakeasy.
Without this enemy, however, we had little to bind us together, and we became mired in our own selfish wants. We developed a dramatic lack of commonality and brotherhood as we spent every waking hour playing mindless video games and impersonally surfing the web bound together only by our use of microsoft response point. What should have given us a reason to reach out to our worldly neighbors and cooperate with each other, left us without any shared values.
Perhaps you might say that individuality and independence are the chief values of my generation, but I cannot. What we have is a lack of common interest and concern. Our common interests end as soon as we hang up our cellular and IP phones. What we need is to step from our homes, look up into the big blue sky and see that it is not falling. We must witness with our own eyes, that the horsemen of the apocalypse are not here to whisk us away, and that the only place a “red alert” may exist, is in our own, unobservant minds. We have a hope. If anything, we have the chance to truly unite and fill the streets; the ability to connect with the millions, even billions of other members of our generation and say “no more.” We've been given the tools, the Internet, email, IP telephones; We have the opportunity to define ourselves as the generation without fear; the one that went to the world and rejected abject hatred, accepted hope and acted to bring about a lasting peace and unity.