I Wanna Be Sedated...


Subject: I Wanna Be Sedated...
From: Cecilia Baader (cbaader@cubsmvp.com)
Date: Mon Apr 16 2001 - 02:10:49 GMT


Greetings, Fish.

I just finished reading a news release that tells me that Joey Ramone-- of all people-- is dead. The end of an era? The end of something.

Now, some of you may not know who bushy-haired Joey Ramone is, may not recognize anything that his band, The Ramones, played, but I think it's enough to say that the man's credited with creating the ultra-countercultural movement, punk rock.

Why do I bring this up on this list? I guess it's because Joey Ramone (who I swear I bumped into in a bar in New Orleans many years ago) is dead and I've been doing a slow burn over an article I read in The Atlantic Monthly just this month, called "The Organization Kid". So I guess now is as good a time as any to bring this up, since I'm pretty sure that there's several bananafish that fall into the category that the article claims to be investigating.

http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/issues/2001/04/brooks-p1.htm

Let me summarize. Apparently, if you're college-aged or slightly younger, you're what's known as an "organization kid". That is, a kid that doesn't buck authority or, indeed, anything else. The article offers some statistical results from a 1997 Gallup Survey of teenagers. Get this: 96 percent said they got along with their parents. Huh? At sixteen? Nobody gets along with their parents at that age. There's more. In 1998, Roper Starch surveyed students aged twelve to nineteen about the major problems of America today, and the top five concerns were selfishness, people who don't respect law and the authorities, wrongdoing by politicians, lack of parental discipline, and courts that care too much about criminals' rights.

Can this be right?

I'm finding it hard to believe that the next generation is such a bunch of conformists. Tell me I'm wrong. I'm thinking if the exception exists anywhere, it will be subscribers to this list, the folks who identify with Holden Caulfield. Is anybody still flunking out of, running away from, or even cutting school?

The article goes on to state that the nation appears to be raising a generation of Stepford Children. (Okay, the article doesn't *exactly* say that, but that's my take on it.) It seems wrong. Just wrong. So tell me that this guy is just spouting a bunch of statistics and that they have no bearing on reality. Tell me that a teenager is still a teenager and that you still hate everybody and everything.

I guess I'm just trying to understand. And Joey Ramone is dead, and I guess too that I'm wondering if anyone even knows who he is.

Regards,
Cecilia.

Common Sense. http://www.geocities.com/c_baader

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