Published February 18, 2010

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane”—it’s the end of the world as we know it. Another aftershock shook Haiti on Feb. 15, knocking a boulder loose. The boulder fell on a school, killing four third-graders and injuring a fifth. Hours later, a small airplane crashed 35 miles east of Trenton, N.J., killing five people. We haven’t seen birds in months (pigeons do not count), and, as for the snakes, Samuel L. Jackson took care of them.

We are one more of the lost generations—it was all downhill after the baby boomers. The hope and prosperity of the economic boom and winning a world war faded into equality marches and troops surging into Afghanistan. We were born of the cold war, in a time of flannel and Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

Now, the dying media are trying to shock us into submission. “If it bleeds, it leads,” goes an age-old mantra that no one quite remembers saying; it’s a truth we hold self-evident. If journalism goes, it’s doing its best to take our morality with it. Hardcore journalists—those that knock on doors and ask the questions no one can find the words to answer—well, we’re becoming The Who of the Super Bowl’s half-time show. Those that consume us know we were great, could be great, but we should step back from the fancy light shows and let the iPad take over.

We’re changing the climate, in more ways than one. We care, even if our sometimes apathetic displays of emotion say otherwise. We want to improve the world—changing all the bad into good and all the good into great. But how? We’re told to button up, find a profession and make a living. Well, let’s do that. We can still plant trees.

Here’s the thing—every generation feels lost in space, even if they’re racing through it. We hope for snow days and crack jokes about swine flu because we’re really not sure what else to do. We worry about finding a job after graduation, and we’re worried that the world might end before we graduate. We keep pushing forward because we might stumble into progress. We are bright, shining beacons of distraction.

Midterms will end, spring will come, and there will be more hardship (personal and global). But we’re really good at sarcastic poetry, and we see the humor in everything.

As my favorite fish says, keep on swimming, swimming, swimming. Eventually, this will all let up and we can come up for air. It’s called summer and it’s just over 12 weeks away.