Starting the Conversation
by the Editor
An EAP dream (and why shouldn’t an online cooperative magazine dream?) is that all the generations will come together to exchange information and — maybe most important — questions. What this means. Why things are the way they are. What can be done about that.
Looking around, it looks like somehow we got segregated, all the different age groups in its own little ghetto. The old, of course, are completely marginalized. And we know why, don’t we? There is no one who is more apt to dryly tell the truth in any circumstance than an old person who has no one left to impress and nothing much left to lose. So any consumer society worthy of the name has got to get rid of their opinion — preferably by mocking it — in case it might get mentioned that we’ve based our present system on a wide plain of wet sand. Those of us in the middle are told relentlessly that there is something so wrong with us, that we are individually so weak, unattractive, and ineffective, that there is nothing to be done except renovate our kitchens and forget.
Then there are the young.
Consider the young. Consider how brave they are to be facing the world that’s been made, in part, by what we, their elders, have done to it…or, more importantly, have failed to do. Consider how relentlessly the young are manipulated and exploited and colonized by a media that does not — to put it mildly — have their best interests at heart.
Not even when I was young was it the way it is now, where you see every single aspect of life, even those that should be most sacred and intimate, turned into a marketing opportunity. Every single last thing a young person might be able to claim for her/his own gets scooped up by a rapacious group of elders driven by only one commandment: GET THEIR MONEY.
When I hear (as I do too goddam often these days) about a friend, or the daughter or the niece or the granddaughter of a friend, who is anorexic, I think to myself, “Well, and what else is she supposed to do? How else is she supposed to claim a little private ground for herself? ” Anorexia, especially, seems to me to be about trying to control what you can in a world that has been out to control you since birth. Buy this. Look like this. Buy that. Fight it out with your friends to see who’s on top. And, by the way, don’t forget to shop.
I’d stop eating, too.
Anyway…EAP is casting wide, as wide as it can, to get some kind of conversation going between the old, the middle, and the young. In a safe space, where nobody’s trying to sell anything to anybody. (When I’ve asked advice of marketing people about how to reach what they call “the younger audience,” the words of wisdom that have come back are so appallingly exploitative, so completely about fooling and manipulating and dazzling the natives with bits of colored glass, that I’m left utterly depressed. Down. But not, however, out. I await further guidance of a gentler kind. If anyone’s got any that doesn’t begin: “You know what’s really hot? Selling virtual accessories in a virtual world!” I’m listening.)
This month, I asked for contributions along the lines of A Letter to An Intelligent Teenager. By which I meant teenagers of all ages, of course. Because it’s not just chronological, is it? And some great things showed up. I especially like CB Parrish’s In Praise of Full Fat, which she definitely wrote for teenagers of all ages, whether she knows it or not. And then there’s Mike Madrid’s Low Self Esteem Top Ten (for Girls), which will make it impossible for you to listen to good time pop songs in quite the same way again. Stephanie Sides kicks herself over Things I Wish I’d Known. And Ask Wendy is in a fury about anyone younger than herself turning into a Zombie. Since Ask Wendy is over a hundred years old, that’s just about all of us. Worth reading, for sure.
Next month, what I’d really like is Communiqués from the Intelligent Young — of all ages. So we define a member of the Intelligent Young here as someone who is trying to figure out who they are, what they should be doing, and what kind of world they want to leave behind. Which come to think of it, is just about all of us. So maybe we could leap over those ghetto walls (they aren’t that high after all), and mill around together, deep in conversation about the things that matter.
Want to start a conversation? Send your communiqués to EAP. We can’t wait to read them, actually.
Welcome back.