An 'elder millennial' looks back on the class of 2000
The last decade has felt like a reckoning of sorts with preceding decades. Not that the present isn’t chaotic and metaphorically (and often literally) on fire, but in many ways it feels like society has evolved out of some of its collective ignorance and so looking back can be both a shock and a surreal vision of something almost narcotic in its obliviousness. That double-edged nostalgia is what the poem "sweet spot" [below, at the end of the story] in my new book, Middle Youth, came out of. The second half of the 80s and early 90s were deeply problematic times – the sweetness has unraveled with hindsight, as often happens, like memories of a really bad boyfriend you were super in lust with.
For context, I’m what gets referred to as a "Xennial" or "Elder Millennial" – born in the early 80s and deep in teenage angst for much of the 90s. The class of 2000 – I saw the millennium in swaying somewhat drunkenly under public fireworks on the Wellington waterfront. I remember Prince’s 1999 playing in civic square and feeling weird that it would no longer be relevant. Mum still has a "prepare for Y2K" magnet on her fridge. We thought planes might literally fall out of the sky as the clocks ticked over, but as someone I knew in those days recently pointed out to me, we couldn’t name one single person that was "out" in our super-liberal high school.
One of the things I’ve been trying to reckon with in Middle Youth is this tainted nostalgia coupled with the idea that my generation are now "grown up" though with very little to show for it in comparison with our parents’ generation. There is an undeniable tension between these generations, and a sense that they didn’t act in time to steer the world out of the nosedive we seem to be in. But what did we do? We were half aware we were heading for a climate crisis, but we still wanted those Happy Meals. Could we, as children, have done more? And now that we’re the adults in the room, how do we reckon with the state of things? How do we account for our actions or lack thereof to the younger generations who haven’t had the luxury of that "sweet spot" of ignorance, of childish innocence – who will never get to know what it was to grow up on a planet that isn’t under immediate threat. I realise it is ridiculous to spend my time reckoning with this stuff by writing poems – how useful!
The poem references a lot of fictional cultural icons that are now tainted by dubious capitalist ideals, outright abuses (the downfall of Mr Huxtable is what set me off on this), or which seem almost quaintly destructive (archaeology and bombs!). The earliest international news event I remember seeing on TV is the Berlin Wall coming down in Nov 1989. France was still testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific, the Gulf War imagery was always on the news, grunge happened (I named my pet mouse Kurt) as well as Disney’s Pocahontas. I wonder what kids now will remember – will it be the world having its hottest day on record? Will it be a blur of floods and forest fires?
I imagine that feeling a combination of nostalgia and a deep, shuddering loneliness when looking back at one’s childhood (and its cultural/temporal context) is fairly universal. I hope today’s kids will at least have some conflicted sweet nostalgia in among their childhood memories – we all only get to be young once, after all. Things always seem clearly problematic in hindsight – it’s how we know we’ve collectively grown, and I for one hope we do not have to go back.
sweet spot
Everyone’s favourite father
was Cosby.
We could all be anything we wanted —
thousands of prime ministers.
Molly could Frankenstein a ball dress
out of her dead mother’s clothes
and become the coolest
girl in school.
We watched action movies,
each explosion just a thrill —
fossil fuels were burning anyway,
open oil fires in the Middle East,
unquestionable wars, the wall
down, the market always open,
fast-food birthdays, cartoon figurines
to collect with the produce
of new Amazonian farmland. We worried
about atolls but also how many things
we got for Christmas, which plastic
approximation of a colonised princess.
Suburban jeeps meant an Indiana Jones
lived next door, small-town builder
with a swimming pool, heated
against the open air,
electricity endless, the summer warm
but droughtless, grass always green
everywhere. A pet lamb to raise
and never ask after
when it disappeared.
Middle Youth by Morgan Bach (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25) is available in bookstores nationwide.
