Jordan Zakarin

Historians Will Excuse Me For Being Fucked Up?

TIME Magazine on this horrible decade:

Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We’re still weeks away from the end of ‘09, but it’s not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over.

This decade was as awful as any peacetime decade in the nation’s entire history. Between the West’s ongoing struggle against radical Islam and our recent near-death economic experience — trends that have largely skirted much of the developing world — it’s no wonder we feel as if we’ve been through a 10-year gauntlet.

I was 13 at Y2K, an eighth grader waiting for the world to end in his friend’s basement, stocked high with snack chips and cola to see through Armageddon.

Computers didn’t go haywire and destroy all that we had built — that meltdown was a slower burn, with moments of major shock leaving us weaker and weaker each time they struck, seemingly out of the blue. And amidst this Decade From Hell, I grew up.

There’s both micro and macro views to take of this for me, a product of this most tragic era. I never thought of myself, or my peers, as members of some seminal, proper nouned generation, like the Depression/WW II Greatest Generation, or Flower Children or Baby Boomers or Gen X. Maybe because all those generations were so interested in dissecting themselves that we just existed.

But, in many ways, my peers and classmates and friends and I, we’re the perfect sample for the sociologists and historians who will want to look back on what this decade did to a group of people. Frankly, I don’t know that we know. We’ve been too busy AIMing and then Live Journaling and then Facebooking and Tumblr-ing our crushes and last night’s parties to really twitter the meltdown.

I was a sophomore in high school on THE 9/11. I lived 11 miles from Manhattan. My town lost 17 people. If you’re gonna study anybody, study me. Maybe my natural cynicism is a result of all that mindless loss, maybe driving past that Ground Zero every day on my way home from work now that I’m “all grown up” fucks me up.

But that spring, we went on with our fantasy baseball draft, I worried more about being a camp counselor than post traumatic stress on myself and my generation, and girls tortured me more than Osama bin Laden ever could. I think that may make them terrorists.

I wasn’t ignorant of world affairs, and neither are many in my generation, whatever the casual grouping means. I was active in ‘04 as an 18-year old, trying to beat Bush, even going to the DNC. I mourned with friends when Kerry lost. But then it was back to parties and college and this new fangled social networking stuff that our parents now so lamentably pollute.

The big economic meltdown, well, that impacts us more, because it’s a real trick to get a first job right now, especially for all my friends in media. But do we sit around and discuss the impact that fateful day in September ‘08 when the DOW crashed, what impact that had on us? Not when there’s Beatles Rock Band to play.

This is the decade I grew up in. The 90’s were no piece of cake for a naturally high strung kid always buried in his own brain, but learning to draw Spiderman and understanding Kurt Cobain’s death and begging my parents for a dog and visiting Disney World, those are pretty standard operating procedures for kids. Or so I tell myself.

But the 00’s? That’s when it all went down. I went from eighth grade to working full time, living on my own and making my money and enjoying my own health benefits. I make my own bed times, I wake myself up, I enter relationships and try to figure out what the fuck is next. That transition occurred this decade, amidst all the meltdown.

I entered high school, to mass derision, thanks to my height and willingness to invite lonely kids to my already less-than-cool lunch table. I found myself in music, and for a while it was okay to be that geek. I found a love of writing, first journalism then comedy. I pursued baseball and music and short screenplays about the heartache of being a teen that can get rejected digitally, not just the face to face broken hearts of earlier, luckier generations. I went to college and found my best friends and a little bit of who I am, though all this self discovery was hidden under hours laughing in front of the TV or making films or sneaking into parties with people so much cooler than me, or so much weirder.

I had two heart surgeries, one to open and one to close the decade. I’m 100% completely healthy now, but still, the pain involved, that’s enough to say this decade sucked. And in a lot of ways, fuck, growing up does suck.

It’s hard for me to compare this decade to anything else, to say it was so much worse or so much better. I don’t have much nostalgia to paint rose and be wistful for. I don’t have a bank account that was much higher during the Clinton Administration. I saw Back To The Future after the fact, when the future was already such a disappointment to those who saw Marty McFly as a leader blazing the path out of droll Reaganism and into something so much more.

(As an aside, I regret not knowing more about those of my generation who truly were impacted by the meltdown of this decade, those soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s part of the problem, I think. We’ve got this small subset of our population, or our generation, fighting so all of us can be in high school and college and writing for TIME, all waxing sad and poetic about how about this decade sucked, as we sit still comfortably, trying to one up each other with forced insight. Let this essay not include the suffering they went and continue to go through, because I can’t pretend to understand it or its long term impact, and as anti-war as I am, I’ll never take it for granted. I just hope they can be fucked up just like the rest of us, no more and no less.)

This decade sure did suck, for America. And in a lot of ways, for me. I’d never repeat high school again. But for my peers, my friends and I, this is really all we’ve known. So history can analyze us, use this blog post as a primary source (the utility of which I’m sure will be argued over in Universities and blogs themselves over the next twenty years). I can’t tell you what the shock and awe and trauma of the decade did to us, or me, but I’m here to blog and genuflect on it, so that must say something.

Notes

  1. idbebetteroffdead reblogged this from jordansheartsucks and added:
    Wow, this is great. I don’t post many serious entries, but please take the time to read this.
  2. jordansheartsucks posted this
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