9-26-06, Memoir/Reading Response

For the Best Minds of My Generation

An absence of hope is the absence of the will to live. What I consider to be depressing, or indeed, what I consider as the state of depression, may seem at once antithetical to the established emotional milieu. My generation, at least those who have made the journey from secondary school to higher education, are still dealing with the aftershock of the emotional, social, and economic fallout of the last half-century.

Chances are, at least three authors any classmate has read as an assignment this year either were committed institutionally, committed suicide, or both. This is present across all college levels, and at most colleges in every state. And this is indeed even more prevalent within the English major.

My generation deserves and wants an authentic mixture of the human experience, not post-McCarthy centrism. So, we must ask ourselves why this celebration of clinical depression has become the norm.

First, we must differentiate between sadness and depression. Sadness, the normative opposite of a state of equilibrium, is natural in many species besides homo sapiens. Yet it is our own flawed higher thinking processes that can trick us into associating sadness with depression. Depression is a clinical state in which the mind-body connection is prevalent. The person often exhibits signs of complete hopelessness, a lack of interest in general, or suicidal tendencies. This is accompanied by an eventual breakdown in the person’s state of health. Thus, being ‘sad’ for a period of time, long or short, or experiencing bouts of sadness is normal, but depression usually requires some level of clinical evaluation and assistance.

Second, we must examine how this apparent saturation of depressed writers and depressing subject matter has blanketed the academic community. In a brief examination of the 1900s, it is not too hard to see why these themes have become the norm. After the “War to End All Wars”, there were, from the American vantage point, three major wars after that. These were marked by fallout from mass extermination, internment camps, recurring Napoleon complexes of every shape and size, economic rise and fall on a tidal wave scale, social-relational upheaval, and religious collapse as a result. Staggering shockwaves of supposed errata rippled through the collective unconscious. Churchill, after the Second World War, wisely prophesied, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

These were the times of the Ivies’ mass hold on the educational structure of higher education; an oligarchy. The few ‘best’ dictated what the rest would consume. And the literature of this time stands as a relevant testament to what these generations experienced. It was relevant to them; thus it was what they wrote. It is important not to forget this fact. It is the reason why college programs are saturated with post 1950s disillusionment.

Third, we must examine what my generation needs, and why we need it. I can say with certainty that in literature we need an honest, imaginative, bold mix of our forefathers and ourselves. We cannot know where we’re heading until we know where we came from. This is by no means easy, as Vine Deloria, Jr. explains, because those of us in the WASP majority, honestly, have no established culture. We have bits and baubles, two-hundred years worth of legends and fairytales. My generation is still dealing with 9/11, and the authentic fear brought on from both sides by monsters like terrorism and government suppression. We are, in fact, still dealing with the advent of the iPod and the communication breakdown brought on by the Internet. Electronica has become the substitute parent for many. Thus my generation needs a mixture of the depressing and the hopeful, the real and the unreal, the historical and the imaginative.

My most poignant moments of sadness have not been when something unfortunate has happened to me personally, but when I see a young imagination crushed early. A teacher in an English class I attended once said to the class, “… but we don’t want to emulate that style (Romanticism). Why? Because it’s old. It’s outdated.”

Centrism is deadly. Homo sapiens' existence is a drop of water in the bucket of the cosmos. The last five thousand were a molecule. The last fifty years were an atom. We are begging the academic and critical community to stop treating that atom as though it's the center of the universe.

I look at my generation and I see echoes of the prophet Allen Ginsberg, who saw “… the best minds of (his) generation destroyed by madness.” Sadness and depression are obviously familiar to us, but this generation has the single greatest potential to reach the boundaries of the human imaginary potential of any generation in the past. It is up to us, students and teachers, to help each other reach that potential.

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