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Young Adults Find Themselves Adrift

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 16, 2008

I'm not quite sure what to make of the 20-something generation. I think they're lost.

I said this to my newly 20-something youngest daughter the other day. She said, "What? Lost?" in that tone daughters use when they really want to ignore you. She heard me but made me say it again. And then I get the eye roll and the tone: "Why, dad?" This is not a question, it is a dare.

I said, "OK, tell me who the poets and writers are of your generation that open doors of awareness and reason. Where are the artists, the teachers, the innovators who help shape the way you think? Who are your Malcolm, your Rand, your Captain Kangaroo? Who today equals the Beatles or Stevie, The Temptations or BTO?"

They have boy bands that don't play instruments, books about traveling pants, a rerun vision of history from Nick at Nite.

My generation looked out on life and saw what was missing, we asked why and what if. We were left to our own imaginations and came up with life in faraway galaxies. We were told to go outside and find something to do and came back with an apple, a mouse and a window to the world. Somebody told his kid, there is no limit to where you could go if you are willing to take a step.

My generation had something to prove. I mean, look who we followed.

I know not everything in the good old days was all that peachy keen. We had our share of bad politicians and a war that seems to never end. But what I remember most about my generation is basically being involved in life, being involved in the development and growth of my community.

Whether you were right or left, for or against, I remember when the call went out for action, we gathered and committed and planned and partied and, in our minds, got things done. It was a time of coming together for the sake of improving the place where we lived and in the process improving ourselves.

It was not a time for reruns.

My 20-something daughter and her generation will one day become the people in charge of my town, Tampa. They will rename Dale Mabry Highway, tear down a few buildings that once were landmarks, probably dump a sports franchise or two. By the time they get to my age, they too would have seen two or three different mayors or, worse, two or three county mayors. They will have tried again, for the sixth or seventh time, to revitalize Ybor City.

She looks at me with that look and asked "Captain Kangaroo? You mean the cartoon guy on the cereal box?" I don't suppose the good old captain made the reruns on Nick.

William Scruggs is a Tampa resident.

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