Grumping right along...

I mentioned yesterday that my generation doesn't really have a label, and suggested we might be called the Silent Generation or the Between Generation. We never really got the attention like the Baby Boomers, and we don't have a collective identity.

Yet the women of my generations have been pioneers, we have broken ground. We can't all be Gloria Steinem (what I wouldn't have given, once, to look like her!), or even Nancy Pelosi, both members of my generation, but I'm sure there are thousands of us who muddled through our conflicts about being nice vs being effective and managed nevertheless to make a dent in our own ways. Once upon a time I had a job no woman had ever held before me, as a hospital administrator in a major teaching hospital where for a long time I was the only woman in administration. It was tough, but I needed to support my sons after a divorce and I needed the money that working in administration provided. Later on I nearly cracked up in that job, due to the fact that the years of experience and the contacts I made in the health admininstration profession convinced me that our healthcare system was on the way to being something I considered immoral ... but that's a story for another day, perhaps. For now, it's worth noting that I managed not to crash until my youngest was able to drive and was living with his father instead of with me. By the time I left that profession a couple of years later, no one was financially dependent on me anymore. We did what we had to do, we didn't expect it to be easy, or to be handed anything for free, the women of my generation.

If there's a name for the generation that's now in high school and college, I don't know what it is. Probably there is one. But if I had to name them, I'd call them the In Your Face generation. These young people seem to be so blatant about everything. They are the very opposite end of the spectrum from my youthful-becoming-lifelong conflicts over being nice. What is going on with these people?

I was noticing yesterday, just driving around doing errands, the difference between the ways the boys dress and the girls dress. Both sexes are over-the-top but in different directions. The boys I passed on the sidewalk, on their way home from the high school, were wearing huge trousers with crotches down to their knees, hems draped over the tops of their shoes -- how they can walk in those things I have no idea -- and roomy hoodies with the hoods up to almost completely cover their faces, in color their clothing almost universally black. A person just about couldn't be more covered up than those boys. Yet the girls, most of them, were in these little tops they call "shirts" -- would someone please tell them that a shirt has sleeves and a collar, which look more like lingerie or something you might sleep in -- and low-slung skin-tight jeans, usually with navel visible. Talk about inappropriate for the weather, not to mention whatever else! But here's the thing: Even their clothing is In Your Face.

Where are these young people going with their choices in clothes? What is it they're trying to express? Why do they do it?

My oldest granddaughter is 13. I wonder if she dresses like that. I'd say, if I had teenagers I'd forbid them to dress that way, but I know it wouldn't do any good. When I myself was that age I wore a school uniform, but by the time I was in college I wasn't above taking an extra outfit with me to the city and changing out of my everyday, more acceptable clothes for a night of tramping around North Beach, to the Purple Onion etc. I'm talking San Francisco in the late 50s, when the Beats were thriving. I wore black on those nights, myself -- I think I was 18 when I began hanging out in North Beach on weekends. I guess kids too will do what they gotta do, and I know that. What I really want to know is WHY these today act and dress the way they do?

One thing for certain: They aren't going to grow up conflicted about whether they should or should not say what's on their mind. And I seriously doubt they even have the concept of being "nice" the way I was taught to be nice. Most likely that's a good thing, in your face or not.

-- Dianne