By SAMUEL BROWN


To my apathetic generation,


Greetings and salutations, my fellow half-baked, drooped shouldered, too tired to give a damn comrades. Welcome to the rest of your life. Here we sit, about to leave our college experiences; even those just starting, you will be leaving soon enough. As a senior, I’ll articulate what you will be saying when your time has come to stare at your cap and gown still in the original plastic wrap stashed in your closet. You will be saying, “I have not learned a thing. I am fully under prepared to exit into a world so fucked up I have no idea where to begin. How will I make my mark? How will I contribute to society? How will I succeed?” Gather ‘round, children, and listen: if you’re goal is not to make money, well then it’s time to drop acid and drop out of society.

We are the apathetic generation. We don’t give a fuck. Hipsters are the iconic group that exemplifies our attitudes. We are the children of the Hippies, only we no longer have the hopefulness and sunshine they did. Ours is a dirty, childish, post-modern no. We have no greater ideals to look to for support. Gone is our dependence to the land, to society, to religion, to our nation, to our occupations and even to our families. We are independent, without dependency. Where does this leave us? Alone and frightened. Frightened of becoming like our parents, living in a box, not being able to eat, having no direction, living a worthless life and dying a meaningless death. Just today, after I registered for my last semester of classes, I went back to my room and listened to my Sesame Street Sing-A-Long record and talked about childhood lunchboxes.

What is this? Where is our strength? Where is the courage that should be natural and irrepressible at the ages 18-22? People of different generations had fought wars and led nations at this age, why are we, the educated elite, dreaming of kindergarten? Why is the newest way to hydrate is no way different than the bottle we used when we were weaned from our mother’s tit? What is going on?

Right now, the only thing holding our miserable country and our generation together is pinned on President-Elect Barack Obama. Unfortunately, electing Senator Obama and expecting change is like giving your car a new paint job when the engine is rusted and expecting it to run. So, when he fails us, because America’s going down as hard as Rome, our entire generation will flip out. We will have chaos, because the system has yet again failed, and Obama is our last hope.

Currently, we are propping ourselves up on money. We think money can solve all issues, it can save the inner city kid, it can stop thousand year wars between races, and it can feed starving nations. Money can do none of these things, look to Congo, look to Palestine, look to even your hometowns; it is like throwing glitter into an open wound as if it could heal. Capitalistic gain is not a substitute for happiness. We take from others and give money in return to buy a flat screen TV. And now look, our nation’s going into a spiraling decline, so even our money can’t save us.

So let us review: our nation has failed us, our money is worthless, and all things we use to identify with are gone. So we are left with the post-modern problem, we are all alone. No wonder we are reaching for bottles and fearing graduation. Once we leave Wheaton College, we enter a cold and lonely reality: where there is a small chance we’ll get a job, what with the economy. It is therefore time to re-evaluate and embrace our apathy.

Yes, we’ve resoundingly been labeled The Apathetic Generation. The reason is because we no longer want to put any energy into a system that does not work and will not work. Our entire educated lives we’ve been under Bush, we’ve grown to distrust anything the GOP gives us. When Obama fails us, we will revert to the same stance. It wouldn’t matter if Hillary Clinton or John McCain were in office; the fact is we no longer believe that America is working for us. However, there is a solution.


If we are apathetic, then let’s do it. Let’s say fuck it to society. We’ve been taught since we were children that we need to be successful, and the path to success is by following the rules that society has laid out for us, by getting good grades, going to internships and landing a nice job with a good company that is upwardly mobile. To what end? So we can make money.

We still have another option open to us. We can drop out of society. We can choose not to take the high paying job; we can make just enough money to survive. The Nobel Prize winner for Economics this year said that national growth could no longer be measured by economic progress. What does this mean? It means we must all look to the nation of Bhutan.

The Bhutanese government since the ‘70s has been measuring its growth by Gross National Happiness, or GNH. According to wikipedia.org, “The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.” No longer looking to money as a way to approximate growth, the nation looks to how happy people are as an indication of how the nation is doing as a whole. I, for one, would love to live in an America where the nation is measured and lead by making decisions on how to make and keep people happy.

But how can we as an apathetic generation accomplish this? By dropping out and not paying our taxes, we are saying no. No the system doesn’t work. No we do not support the American way of making a buck. No we won’t be part of American politics. Our parents started this in the ‘60s; let’s take it all the way home. Drop acid, don’t pay your taxes, and don’t help this corrupted American system continue to be. If we all stop playing the game, then America will change.


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