Courtney Martin on the political milestones that shaped my generation’s experiments in living an ethical life:
As this decade comes to an end, so do my 20s. For me and many of my generation, the past ten years have marked a series of experiments — sometimes misguided — in living ethically. The question was (and is): What does an ethical life look like in an era of terrorism, reality television, vast wealth disparity, and the Internet?
My generation’s real political education began in a very concerted way on September 12, 2001. I was 21, just staring down my senior year at Barnard College in New York. In a matter of hours, my invincibility, my naiveté, my sense that there would always be enough time to do what I was supposed to do and be who I was supposed to be, was obliterated. I watched women in torn panty hose, high heels in hand, walk up Broadway with dazed looks and realized that the world was far more complex and dangerous than my political science classes had made it seem. Before, my generation had identified with Fight Club‘s description of the “middle children of history” with “no purpose or place … no great war or depression.” Suddenly, we were violently initiated into war time. Depression, of course, would come later.
