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I find the creative process an erratic and sometimes uncomfortable one, but I just couldn't be satisfied without it.
For example, a couple of weeks ago, while sitting with a friend of mine, talking about love and marriage or some such, suddenly the phrase Peter Pan Generation came to mind. This somewhat vague concept continued to nag me until finally, last night, I expressed my thoughts though somewhat inarticulately to her. These thoughts had nothing to do with her. These thoughts sprouted instead from my own realization that I still felt uncomfortable unprepared for many aspects of adult life. I have a high school diploma, some college, three years in the army, and life and study abroad under my belt. I have lived on my own (that is, separate from my parents and from the nagging, allowance-paying, roof-over-your-head, dad-can-I-borrow-the-car environment of the enlisted army) for some time, paying my own bills and getting to work on time. However, I still cling to adolescence. I still want to be provided for. I still don't follow the news (except sometimes on the television). My attempts to advance myself are half-hearted, sporadic, and unrealistic. In short, I still feel like a teen-ager.
Granted, I have given up the notion that any real, useful political end could be achieved through pop culture. Music is simply music. Rebellious and angry lyrics do not lend it any more quality. I don't have any sad dreams of becoming a post-modern hippy whem the President makes a decision I don't appreciate. Like many people my age, I have even reached a point of apathy toward any issue that doesn't affect my life directly. Like Vonnegut's Mrs. Rosewater, I am burnt out on caring. I am tired of being outraged.
In fact, I see these symptoms of the Peter Pan Generation among many people of my age group. In conversation I find evidence, if not direct statement of these feelings. On the television, I see characters of my age group (late twenties to early thirties) clinging desperately to their youth. The more I look, the more it seems to me that anyone who cares anything about anybody only does so as a result of having been instructed to do so by their favorite pop icon. In fact, anyone with anything but the most ambiguous of political standings seems to have developed it as a result of their particular niche in the pop culture. One particular friend of mine proudly wore emblems of the S.H.A.R.P. boy's club (SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice) after a few months of exposure to bands aligned with that particular youth group. (If you must be a skinhead, I suppose that's a nice kind of skinhead to be.) The last time I met him, though, he had converted to the more angry flavor of skinhead after a modest exposure to some good, old, foot-stompin' Skrewdriver.
All tirades against pop-politics aside, I feel that it boils down to our parents, our schools, and our child psychologists. When they didn't push us in school even held us back sometimes did that make us healthier adults? When they decided we'd "grow out of it with age" at home, did that make us healthier adults? When people's past emotional trials become an excuse rather than a hurdle to overcome in striving for excellence, we find ourselves with fewer and fewer role models to teach us how to become healthy adults.
I see role models presented on T.V. to our little brothers and sisters who might encourage them to stretch their painful adolescences well into their thirties. Just watch your standard family situation comedies any night of the week, and you'll see what I mean. Liberal, progressive, and open-minded parents who sport those qualities to a fault (to the point of being goofy) raise trendy, liberal, progressive, and open-minded children who have no need of exhibiting any sort of responsible behavior.
Perhaps I do wrong in slandering my own generation. Peter Pan never grew up. Let's wait for the next batch.