X vs Y: Are us Millennials REALLY functioning on the same level as our Parents decades ago?

Given my being bogged down with exams and term papers right now, I thought it might be a welcome change of pace if I presented something a little more positive and inspiring this time around.

People sometimes respond to my criticisms of my own generation with cliched maxims like, “Young people are no different today than what they were thirty years ago,” and “Teenagers are no dumber now than what they were when I was growing up.” Those are lovely sentiments on the surface, but I’m afraid that they are largely erroneous, and actually reek of the sort of mentality that one associates with defensive (and bad!) parents!

To defend my generationally self-deprecating side of the debate, I’m presenting here the profiles of seven amateur teenage artists from 25 to 30 years ago. These Artist-of-the-Month profiles were taken from issues of Art & Man, a defunct art appreciation magazine that was distributed in North American high-school art classes when my parents were growing up. I found these seven issues stashed away at my parents’ place a few weekends ago.

Please take a few minutes and explore the work and attitudes of these seven teenagers—keeping in mind that these people were developing their artistic character in one of the (supposedly) most hollow decades of the Twentieth Century, the 1980s!  in other words, these young people predate even the Grunge movement and “Gen-X consciousness”. In our current age of empty-headed ego and pointless “selfies”, how many high-school and college students do you know who are functioning on this creative level and with the same degrees of interest, maturity and devotion? Seriously. How many?

According to my search of the Internet, Ms Nevins is now a lawyer operating out of Miami, Florida. She still dabbles seriously in photography.  Some examples can be found on her Facebook page.

Mr Olivero might be the same Darren Olivero who now works as a creative consultant specializing in various installations and mixed media projects.  If so, his business’s official website can be found here.

Mr Sharff went on to become the architect he was studying to be.  This is his official website.

It’s not completely certain, but James Carr appears to be working as an architect out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He graduated from Columbia University in 1986, and received a Masters degree in Architecture from MIT in 1994. 

I found Tom—or Thomas—on Facebook, a little grayer, but none the worse for wear.  He eventually graduated from Pratt Institute and owns and operates TF Design Works (formerly Frohnapfel Design). He still paints, and several abstract examples can be found at the TF Design Works website. 

Besides carrying on with her painting, Ms Veneman now works various roles at the University of Houston in Texas.  A recent interview with her can be found here.

It appears Ms Naylor (or McLaughlin) still resides in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.  She never pursued an artistic career, but she does have cute children at least.  She can be found here on Facebook.

Taken from the same old magazines, here are a few scenes from some actual American high-school art classes and field outings in the 1980s.  Note how the teenagers in question do not look like porn stars, gang-bangers and illiterate car thieves.  

Here are the covers of the seven issues of Art & Man from which I’ve stolen the above profiles and article excerpts.  The older ones (1983-1985) were most likely my father’s; the 1987 issues were undoubtedly my mother's.  

Bombarded by Nonsense: Mumbling and Grumbling through February

It seems February is not only the shortest month but also the coldest and most miserable month in this province, traditionally—and this winter it’s certainly not proving to be any welcome exception. Snow, ice, freezing temperatures—arrgghh!! I relish a good healthy walk to campus, but this winter I find myself having no choice but to resort to buses and cabs on a relatively regular basis. When it’s not snow or freezing rain overhead, it’s ice and gunk underfoot. And what’s with all the wind—especially out in the central and northeast regions? Aren’t increased winds in this part of the country supposed to be one of the sure signs of global warming? At least Dr David Suzuki would have us believe so.

Although a mild patch—if not the early onset of spring—would be quite welcomed right now, I am not one to avoid the realities of season and location. I am not retreating to my well-heated bedroom, donning a two-piece bathing suit and sipping exotic drinks while The Beach Boys and Hawaiian steel-guitar music reverberate from the stereo. Summer is summer and winter is winter by my books. And my taste in music changes to suit the weather, with The Cure, Joy Division and the early Doors taking up long-term residence on my turntable and in my CD player this time of year. ’Tis the season to be gothy, I say. My father also recommends lots of classic ‘Kraut rock’ for the winter season. I can see his point. Despite opening with a song about hallucinating in the desert, Lonesome Crow, the Scorpions’ 1972 debut, does sound very cold, desolate and windy.

I mentioned that I’m not one to avoid reality. This is more than can be said for those MUN students who have been kicking up such a stink over computer-science professor John Shieh’s choice of topic for a recent assignment. Professor Shieh, so the story goes, asked his students to design a computer program to calculate whether or not a fictional rape victim named Heather was likely to commit suicide. “Several” of his students, apparently, took offense at the supposedly light handling of the dark subject matter, and subsequently contacted the oversized prepubescents that comprise MUN’s student union. The next thing you know, student union representative Candace Simms is tattling to the media and all hell breaks loose.

Candace Simms: shit disturber

Are young men and women at the post-secondary level today really this sensitive and sheltered? In our parents’ youth, controversial topics involving sex and violence were sometimes handled at the juniour-high level and even earlier. My father recalls his sixth-grade teacher dividing the class into two groups every other Friday afternoon and debating such topics as gun control. Keep in mind, this took place in the 1980-81 school year, a period in which the bullets were flying at everyone from John Lennon to President Reagan to Pope John Paul II. My mother remembers boys and girls being paired off in eighth grade and given an egg or doll to raise as their illegitimate child. Of course Professor Shieh was exhibiting questionable taste in presenting such an assignment topic to his class. But something tells me that if all of MUN’s professors avoided topics like rape and suicide in their classroom settings, whiny pretend-altruists would be complaining the other way, and screaming for them to be “relevant”. People like Candace Simms have a juvenile longing to be seen and heard for the sake of being seen and heard. Mentally and socially, Ms Simms is hopelessly stranded in middle school. An older friend of mine puts it best when she says, “Sometime during their first semester of university they discover trendy terms like ‘homophobic’ and ‘racially insensitive’, and from that time onward they do nothing but wreak havoc on campus by behaving like silly brainwashed children during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1960s Red China.”

As you probably know by now, after “consultations” with Mark Abrahams, the dean of the science faculty, Professor Shieh has since apologized for his ‘wrongdoing’ and has substituted another topic for the computer course assignment. Meanwhile, Candace Simms—as if every other professor was backing her into a corner with her undies down—is calling for all MUN instructors to receive mandatory sensitivity training at the campus’s Sexual Harassment Office (?!!!). After a little consideration, this might not be a bad idea, actually. The instructors might start by changing Candace Simms’s diaper and monitoring her television viewing.

Speaking of sex, I guess all of us good Canadians are supposed to be avoiding coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics like the plague right now. If we are to listen to the whiny, self-righteous alarmists—like Warren Kinsella—who can’t see the forest for the trees, it would be morally reprehensible of us not to. It appears that everybody’s favourite homophobe this side of Fidel Castro, President Vladimir Putin, has managed to push legislation through the Russian parliament that effectively outlaws the exposure of adolescents to “homosexual propaganda”, and even the Harper government is expressing its disapproval. Really....

Harper and Putin: Two of a kind

Since when have Stephen Harper and company given a damn about gay rights and the autonomy of youth sexuality? Remember, boys and girls, this is the government who voted against gay-marriage legislation and raised legal ages for nearly all aspects of intimacy in the name of “youth protection” (ha!). These people are bigoted assholes and sexually jealous hypocrites who secretly drool at the sight of young flesh. Please keep this in mind as we approach the 2015 federal election—especially if you are turning 18 and preparing to vote for the first time. In the meantime, continued good luck to the Canadian athletes competing in Sochi. At the time of my writing, Canada is in fourth place with the medal count standing at four gold, five silver and three bronze.

And speaking of legal ages, you may be interested to learn that Belgium, where euthanasia has been legal for adults since 2002, has become the first country to extend the right to die to children and adolescents. That’s right—terminally ill Belgians under 18 can now consent to euthanization provided it’s green-lighted by their parents. It’s too bad the Belgian government isn’t so eager to extend voting rights to its nation's youth. Meanwhile, here in Canada, it’s not even legal to help a 98-year-old cancer patient kill himself. Actually, I can see someone like Stephen Harper offering euthanasia to only people under 18 in this country. This way, the Conservative government could kill off a sizable chunk of the threatening youth population before they’re old enough to vote!

Jean Jacques De Gucht of the Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats
—one of those who favoured the bill

Closer to home, the snivelling oppressive scumbags in the Dunderdale government have outlawed tanning beds for anyone under 19. Now, let me make one thing nice and clear: I would rather eat ten packs of extra-tar cigarettes per day than to be caught dead in a solarium. However, to each his own, and I find it more than a little hypocritical that the government will allow people as young as 16 to risk life and limb behind a wheel on the nation’s highways, yet they won’t allow people under 19 to get a suntan because eccentric idiots like Darryl Yetman of the Canadian Cancer Society doesn’t like it. Mr. Yetman and his kind are part of the problem, as opposed to part of the solution. It seems they’re quite adept at interfering with every aspect of society. They appear to have their hands and noses into everything—everything, that is, except actually discovering a cure for cancer. Open your eyes, people: young citizens of the province can even join the military at 17 and run the risk of leaving an arm in someone’s rice patty in the Far East—yet they cannot legally undergo an artificial suntan in their home province until they turn 19! Incredible. At least Vic Lawlor,the owner of seven tanning salons in the province, is speaking out against the hypocrisy and oppression—even if it sounds a bit financially self-serving coming from someone in his position.

Vic Lawlor: Greedy businessman or defender of oppressed youth?

Maybe a bit of both...

Such hypocrisy surrounding the discrepancies in legal ages is something I recently brought up on Facebook, after being “invited” to a discussion featuring Newfoundland and Labrador Liberal Party treasurer Jeff Marshall, who has drafted a resolution to make it Liberal party policy to lower the voting age to 16. I pointed out in a post on the event’s official Facebook page that “if we’re not mature enough to vote when we’re as old as 17, then why [is the criminal justice system] charging us with crimes six years before we’re old enough to legally vote for the moronic creeps who write the legislation we’re contravening? It’s basic oppression, and I’m quite militant about it.” I went on to state in a followup comment that “we won’t see any real changes along the lines of oppressive legal ages, I fear, until the windows start smashing, the rubber bullets start zinging, and the blood and brains start spilling onto the asphalt.” As a result, Kate White, some bureaucratic ninny from the MUN Liberals, responded with the following comment:

“The MUN Liberals do not condone violence against politicians or the Canadian government as a means to political change. If you do not refrain from using violent language and threatening officials you will be removed from the page.”

Ha! Does she actually think I’m concerned about being dismissed from such a pathetic group whose existence is merely symbolic? The naivete simply astounds me! (On December 3rd, Ms White posted a link with the following admonishment on her Facebook wall: “Dear all make-up loving friends: go on this site now. You will die of happiness.” Now, if that doesn’t sound like the thoughts of a woman with devout sociopolitical convictions!) As long as groups like the MUN Liberals are obedient little line-toeing boys and girls, the oppressive system will perpetuate. If Kate White is so concerned about the plight of disenfranchised adolescents, she should learn how to operate a firearm—or at least throw a rock.

Youth political oppression aside, it looks like we’re going to have to settle for throwing snowballs, not rocks, for a considerable time yet. I’m going to be cozying up tonight in a rug with a cup of warm tea and a copy of Escape from Childhood—a book that someone like Candace Simms or Kate White could do well by reading. Now where did I put that Bauhaus CD....