Our Generation

What sort of person am I?

I'm a kind of mystery to most of you. Those of you who comment with me via e-mail, or via IM always comment on how different I come across to how I write.

Well of course. Because I'm not the sort of person you'd expect to have a blog.
But I do.

Because I belong to a whole group of people, a whole social phenomenon, the kids of our generation. A subculture grown amongst us Thatcher's children.

You know of us by repute. You don't expect to see us online.
People seeing me in RL, wouldn't suspect I was the type to blog. We're not the sort who find computers interesting.
Yes, but we ARE the sort to love media. And whilst our sole interests in computers ten years ago was that you could connect a playstation to them, now we've noticed the internet.
And hey, we mastered decks, so why not the internet?

I don't know if you've noticed, but the sort of views I hold on matters political and economic represent a substantial subculture of the western world.

Let me tell you who we are.
We are the children of the Yuppies.

You brought us up listening to the soulless values of Capitalism, after Capitalism had forsaken the moral highground.
YOU claimed the moral highground in the sixties, then sold out.
And we grew up listening to you try to justify your sell out.
This justification was called 'Thatcherism'.

And we grew up learning this 'Sell. Just sell. That's the rules. Everything has a price, even consciences.'

THAT was the morality you sold us as children.

And we thought, we'd better find a morality of our own.
And we went out to find it.

We went to university, the device you designed to process us into the crucial organising class to administer the Capitalist system on behalf of its slave drivers. And we paid it lip service. Hey, it didn't matter what we did. You were going to give us those degrees anyway.
So HELL, did we experiment!

By the time we'd graduated we'd excelled your experiments in the sixties.

Difference is, we didn't do what you did.
You protested, then you sold out.

We just think, yeah, you were right on both counts. This system sucks, that's where you were right first time. You can't change it, not right now. You have to accept what it offers you, that's where you were right with the message you sold us as children.

So we sell out, but not like you did. We sell out by day, to live the values you sold out on in our free time.

We wear suits, use PCs and get excited by the euphoric buzz of serving the corporate world by day.
Then we go home and live lives that to most people, are the lives of a subculture.

When we go to parties, we meet our own. They work in both public and private sector, they are usually graduate educated, tax paying people.
The parties are often extreme, by the standards of the moral majority. People meet, take drugs, have sex, listen to music, discuss world politics, philosophy, music, etc.
Kind of like, educated orgies, if you want to adopt the position of the moral majority.
But we're usually rounded people. Rounded in the sense, that down the pub, we'll tend to talk football, music and women. All of which will lead people who meet you in an ordinary setting to assume that in fact, you're just another shallow salesmen, only interested in beer, football and women, who probably has never even READ a book.

You see us everywhere, and you don't realise it. We form most of the salesforce of this country, much of its lower managerial classes, much of its young professional classes.
Most of us vote for one of the main parties. Our political beliefs don't affect how we vote- we see all that in fairly cynical terms. We'll vote for whatever party offers US the best deal. But ultimately, we're sick of the lot of them. We play the game because we have to.
Right now, I think pretty much the whole subculture is behind Cameron.



I wonder if Cameron realises that the overwhelming majority of Cocaine users in this country will probably vote for him? Of course they will. Cocaine is an expensive substance- used essentially by people who can afford to do it. The average Cocaine user wants Brown out.

No, it's the bigger picture that sickens us. It's just we've learned from our parents.
We're sickened by the obvious lies about the war on terror, the execution of Saddam Hussein, the stoking of Islamophobia, the increasing Big Brother policies, the increase in Police powers, persecution of immigrants, invention of a moral majority to justify persecuting subcultures, dumbing down of the mainstream media, pandering to the lowest common denominator, manipulation of our popular will, expecting us to sit around all day wasting our lives moving your assets round for you, when you don't even have the respect to listen to us.

What we say is the you do not give us 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people'.

And you might fool MOST of the population, but you don't fool us.

We don't think your 'democratic franchise' is worth the paper it's written on. WE THINK, WE FEEL, WE LIVE IN A POLICE STATE. Unlike our parents, we aren't naive enough to think we can beat you.
We adopt the Julia approach to you. We don't fight you, we avoid you. We try as hard as we can to live the way we want to IN SPITE of you.

But we do what we can. We talk, we discuss, we share ideas. Exactly what you don't want us doing.

The Rave Scene taught us something. We learned that we all basically felt the same, and we've carried on with that. Just as our parents learned the values they sold out on in the Summer of Love, we learned ours in the vibrant feeling of goodwill in a dance festival crowd.

Follow the trajectory. When the Hippies reached our age, they sold out.
And over the last ten years, they ran the show.

The Blair government was Britain governed by the Hippies, turned Yuppies, turned, well, you decide.
That's what happens when people try to govern by principles they only accepted because they were bribed to do so, then try supplement them with the ones they forgot.

Ethical foreign policy?



So look where OUR generation are in the cycle.
I think we're holding firm.
We haven't sold out, we just render unto Caesar, what is Caesars.

And we're proving we CAN live perfectly viable lives without your beloved nuclear family, or any of that.

I think, I FEEL, our generation are starting to look beyond just the hedonism of our twenties. And look to getting more political. I think there is a general breeze in the air, that we either do something with what we feel, or we might as well just sell out completely. And we don't want to do that. Some time, it WILL be the turn of our generation to take the helm. And when that happens, we want to cut the strings completely with the baggage of the past.

We're READY to change things, when our turn comes.

That's basically it. We're sitting here, millions of us, in the Western World, chatting subversively in pubs, at parties, on the internet, spreading ideas, so that we know what needs to be done.

We didn't make the mistake our parents did.

We still believe.