This is an intriguing post from Scott Doyon at Placeshakers and Newsmakers - a group blog on issues impacting or related to community.
Read the whole post.Settle Down Now: Is community the new frontier for Generation X?
In 1992, Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha offered a dire warning to a restless but aimless Generation X: “If we don’t take action now,” he sang, “we’ll settle for nothing later.” An anthemic rallying cry and yet, just ten years thereafter, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard was introducing those same listeners to “the sound of settling.”
While the idea of settling carries with it some pretty unsettling connotations, its execution is proving nothing of the sort. In short, the settling down of Generation X, whose youngest members are now turning 30, may very well prove to be a pivotal baby step towards the construction of a more resilient future.
From denial and anger to depression and acceptance:
Zack De La Rocha and Ben Gibbard.Those born in the closing years of the Baby Boom — the founding punk rock generation — may have set out to fight the power and dismantle the system but this head-butting sentiment inevitably gave way to what’s proven a far more definitive characteristic of Generation X: The desire to sidestep authority in pursuit of a more appealing alternate system of their own creation.
It was, after all, the fuel that inflated the original internet bubble. Unapologetically idealistic and hyperbolic, the rise of the dot-com era served as a sort of sneaky end-run around business as usual. If the Boomers in power didn’t get it, why waste energy fighting them when the emerging internet frontier offered you the prospect of building a whole new world from scrap. To your own specs.
Of course, it didn’t work out exactly that way. The internet panned out to be less an alternate system and more a compelling new wrinkle to the existing one. Companies still needed to make money and innovation for innovation’s sake, no matter how cool, was still folly at the end of the day.
Reality bites.
But that’s not the end of the story. What’s important in all this is that, despite the crushing blow of unrealized (or, at least, unrealistic) internet dreams, the defining motivations of Generation X endured. Our instincts still tell us to sidestep power, to make things work on our own terms instead, and nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of localism.
Trends in governance and business over the past half century, with their ideological insistence on centralized efficiency, have reduced us to two extremes. At one end is the self-reliant individual fending for him or herself; at the other are the enormous institutions (both public and private sector) that provide our safety nets and facilitate our access to the stuff we want to buy.
That’s where the power is. Meanwhile, the formerly robust human ecosystem in between — our local and regional communities — has suffered years of malnourishment.
That makes local a pretty compelling new frontier.
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