Throw out your leotards! Go out into the Streets!

What the fuck is wrong with our generation? How did we all turn into a bunch of fashion conscious soulless monsters? Plenty of generations fall off into becoming little embarrassing blips of our cultural history, but it's painful for me to see that it has happened to us. Just look at us, getting brunch on a Sunday morning in our black hoodies and horn rimmed glasses with trashy drunk girls going out to smoke cigarettes before their food arrives (probably so they won't be hungry enough to eat more than a little of it). We compare our fucking ringtones and the best places to download and plug our myspace blogs to our worthless friends. And why is everybody "somebody"? Can't we just accept ourselves as something less than fabulous because let's face it when everyone isfabulous then no one is. I mean I understand that we are the first of the mini-generations (does anyone remember when a generation was longer than five years) to most likely have no memory of our first exposure to MTV and we've been overstimulated throughout most of our coddled existences> It's made us more concerned with being cool than anything else. I guess the peculiar combination of living our childhoods in the decadent 80s, having that interrupted by the short lived mainstream counter-culture of the early 90s and then watching as plasticism took over again and eventually everything became a watered down version of something that had come before during a separate cultural moment. We convinced oursleves that everything had been created, everything had been done. Now, we would just mix and match everything and pretend that we were unique (just like everybody else). So we flit about our lives and we have no real political conscience. Sure, we hate Bush and friends but only because we heard that was cool. Meanwhile, we read Vice magazine and let its insidious anti-humanist agenda slowly seep into our pores. It seems so cool and counter-culture that we somehow miss that its not really ok to make fun of immigrants and have writers fuck random cops just to write about it. And we don't vote. We don't fucking vote! I know the democrats are disapointing. i mean Christ, they are waaaay beyond disapointing and it hurts every time I vote for one. But, that's not the reason that we don't vote. We don't vote because its not cool to vote. It's not cool to vote and it's not cool to care about anything too passionately (except graphic design and fashion). We don't vote because "we're over it" or because we're so anti-this or anti-that. We don't vote so that we can feel superior to those who do. Those poor fucking square saps who still believe that it makes a difference. Those people are sooo pathetic. They probably still shop at the Gap.
The saddest part about it is that none of these people will ever be cool. No matter what high end thrift store they bought their clothes from, no matter how many MySpace friends they have, no how matter how many people came to their friend's art opening, they will never be cool. They will never be cool because there will always be someone exactly like them with their arms crossed, sighing deeply in the corner, commenting to his or her friends how lame that person is for whatever fashion faux pas they have made. Because these people are all alike. They all want to be "different" enough to feel accepted but the only way to be "different" enough is to be better or cooler or hipper than the next person. All our chances at generational unity have been shattered by the culture of cool. We who were born between "78 and "83 will never have a sense of community that isn't based on exclusion, so we'll never have a sense of community.
I would tell you to burn your sideways cocked hat and your leg warmers and your leotards and your American Apparel clothing and especially your copies of Vice Magazine and go out have one sincere thought or emotion. Try being earnest about something anything. Irony isn't cool anymore. I could tell you to do all of that, but why bother you'd just think that I was hopelessly uncool.