Satirical premise: antagonism between the bourgeoisie (pre 50's & 80's) and bohemian (60's) influence has been reconciled in the B0Bo (Bourgeois - Bohemian) aging baby boomer generation.
Smirk-worthy descriptions of SID (status income disparity) suffered by the barely 6-figure cerebral set in Hyde Park and the harrowing journey to the summit of the Seattle REI store; a little too accurate (8 years post publication) to be laugh out loud funny.
...8 years old. If we cited it for a research paper, we would be doing a historical analysis rather than reviewing current events. What defines our generation? What new trends are we seeing? I tweaked a few of Brooks' jabs to better align with the trends I think I see...
- City level activism: Lots of reproach for our lack of involvement in the political sphere. Florida's rebuttal to Tom Friedman's The World is Flat in Who's Your City strikes more of a chord with me. Nations stopped being a meaningful unit of measure. Cities and clusters of cooperating cities which may traverse international borders (NYC-London-Japan) share more commonalities than the rural areas which surround them. As such, we'd expect to see activism on an urban level and successful measures spread across the cluster rather than a state or national level. Think of the spread of community bicycle programs originating in Amsterdam, spreading to Portland, and now even available in temporary alternative communities like Burning Man.
- Decline of Consumption Advocacy: the choice to consume or not to consume was never the question for our forefathers. Using consumer advocacy, they did an awesome job expanding the realm of healthier options (i.e. rBGH free milk, even in Walmart!). But as a consequence, we're left with a morass of unclear tradeoffs. Is it more virtuous to buy Stoneyfield organic yogurt in single serving containers that clog landfills or skip dairy entirely and go vegan? Adopt a 100 mile diet or go Okinawa restricted caloric intake? The obvious consequence will be further documentation of food production. Not just nutritional components, but carbon cost, distance travelled, contamination levels, etc. The more gradual offshoot could be a growing sense that just as a Diet Coke does not equal negative calories, a virtuous food purchase does not equal positive environmental impact. If you're going to consume, these alternatives an improvement over the old guard, but they still have more of an adverse impact than skipping consumption entirely. Smaller is beautiful. You can already start to see rumblings of this-- the kids with $300 netbooks draw a bigger crowd than the kids toting Thinkpads with more computing power than they need; the kids with Zip cars are cooler than the kids hunting for spots to park their Priuses; better to live in a postage stamp apartment in Manhattan than a suburban McMansion far from the maddening crowd.
- Time-Based Volunteerism: similarly, it's not enough to chuck change into the the red tripod outside the mall for the Salvation Army. Two forces push our generation into getting our hands dirty. First, the scandals of the individuals and institutions who manage our investments leads us to crave more transparency and more opportunities to first contribute our time, energy (and surveillance) before throwing our money into the mix. Second, there is a growing awareness that the act of giving drives psychological and subsequently physical health benefits. An antidote to ennui. Giving mitigated through transactional exchanges like financial contributions has a less concentrated and lasting effect on our psyches than the stories we bring back of barn raising and blood donating.
- Health Morality: the rationale bounding behavior driven by health concerns rather than moral/religious imperatives. "Safe Sex" vs. "Abstinence." @ Food Inc with Reid yesterday, Joel Salatin exhorts us to imagine (between humane chicken decapitations) what the world would be like if we made decisions based on a genuine measure like reducing the number of people hospitalized year over year. As we gain greater visibility into healthcare through electronic medical records and more comprehensive testing of factors once thought too pedestrian to warrant medical inquiry (i.e. potential toxins in the products we use), more initiatives will be championed based on their health return on investment. GDP is misleading. Gross National Happiness is too squishy. Reducing the number hospitalized year over year is both comprehensive and precise.
And because I'm a week late in posting. Kiva loan to Jairo in Atlanta for furniture recycling (hits bullets 1 & 2).
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