Carpe Diem

We members of Generation X lack a legitimate source of generational angst.  “The Greatest Generation,” from which our grandparents came, survived the depression and won WWII. Our parents, for good or for ill, gave us Woodstock, Vietnam protests and a post-Watergate hangover.  Then we came along - born between 1965 and 1980, we were born into an era of nearly unparalleled peace and prosperity.  With apologies to those who suffered loss in the Grenada invasion or the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, the U.S.A. avoided anything resembling a war from its withdrawal from Vietnam until the brief Gulf War of 1991, and even that conflict was surprisingly modest in its domestic impact.  Then we enjoyed another 10-year gap before the current conflict began. 

Once we Gen X’rs were old enough to start paying attention to what was going on economically, the nation had shaken its post-Vietnam malaise, ushered the Great Communicator into office and entered an era of robust growth and prosperity.  No one was going off to war, and almost no one was standing in a soup line.  We were double blessed.

So, for those of us coming of age in the 1980’s, there was no shared enemy against which to rebel or crisis to endure.  While peace and prosperity are wonderful, they can create times that are historically uninteresting and artistically uninspired.  We were a generation of flint that lacked the steel to create a spark.  Then Hollywood stepped into the gap.   During the 80’s we were treated to a series of movies that finally gave us the angst we so needed – The Outsiders, The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, and many others that were dedicated to the notion that even when we had peace, roofs over our head and plenty of food to eat - life was still just so darn hard.  Many of the movies featured a lower-middle class kid (kids driving used cars) striving to enter the world of the upper-middle class (kids driving new cars).  In some form or fashion, all the movies were about stuff and status – who had it, who didn’t, and how kids from the separated classes could somehow meet and occasionally mate.  Each movie’s protagonist seized the brass ring, overcame the hurdles and won the pretty girl through charm, wit or athleticism despite their lack of Izod shirts or a BMW.   Hollywood capitalized on the notion that all of us wanted to be Alex P. Keaton – brilliant, handsome and destined for greatness and wealth, and exploited the fact that most of us knew we fell short.

My closest friends and I made fun of those movies.  We were among that annoying set of kids in high school that thinks it is culturally above whatever everybody else likes – and in our case that included John Cuzak and Molly Ringwald.  Still, those movies act as a cultural bookmark for me.  When I sit on the couch, surfing channels during a lazy Saturday afternoon and land on a John Hughes movie, I tend to stay there long enough to watch a memorable scene or hear a quotable phrase.  Despite their nostalgic merit, I still chuckle at their manufactured angst. 

Finally, in 1989, a popular movie came along that my snobbish friends and I could get behind – Dead Poets Society.  Robin Williams (who we knew as the funny alien from the post-jump-the-shark Happy Days and its improbable spin off Mork & Mindy) played Professor Keating.  Keating was a prep school English teacher in 1959.  Among his rich (and angst-ridden) students were Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke.  Leonard played the part of Neil Perry, the son of a controlling, hard-hearted man who could never understand his son’s artistic side and prohibited him from working on the school paper, acting or anything other than excelling in school and preparing for a life of high income.  Hawke played Todd Anderson, Perry’s roommate and the under-performing younger brother of a former valedictorian.

The compelling component of the movie for me was Williams’ character.  In his opening lecture, he has a student read a section of a textbook in which the author reduces poetry analysis to a mathematical formula.  Professor Keating then irreverently instructs his students to rip the essay our of their books, and the boys enjoy their first intoxicating taste of freedom.

In one of the most memorable and quoted scenes in the movie, he tells the boys “Carpe Diem boys. Seize the day.  Make your lives extraordinary!”  He marches the boys to a glass case that houses old pictures of students from the school.  “Worm meat” he says of the students in the photos.  He mimics their imaginary whisper – “Seize the day.”  The implication in his teaching is that the anticipated pursuits of these New England blue bloods (personified by Neil Perry’s cruel father) are vapid, fleeting and hollow.  Wealth is nothing, beauty is everything and life is enjoyed best when everything is risked.  It’s a powerful idea, and of course by the end of the movie someone is dead.

The movie was released between my sophomore and junior years of college, and just before the next generation – Generation Y, the Millenials, the Echo Boomers, or whatever they want to be called (generally, those born between 1980 and 1994) – was old enough to start watching movies.  The theme played right into the growing sentiment among many of my peers that we didn’t want to spend our lives toiling in an empty 9 to 5 job.  We wanted to be engaged in something significant and true, pure and noble, something extraordinary. 

I think of where we all are now.  Among us I count an engineer, a doctor, a couple of pastors, a lawyer, some IT professionals, and blah, blah it goes on.  Sooner or later we all had to earn, and  eventually we all did, some later than sooner and some more than others, but eventually we all did the expected things – college, career, marriage, kids.  Did we sell out or grow up?

In my high school we had our own version of Professor Keating (didn’t we all?).  He pushed us to live outside of the world’s expectations, to embrace beautiful things, and to live examined lives.  Like all Professor Keatings the world over, he had to deal with parents’ objections to his book choices and the subversive thoughts with which he filled us for 50 minutes each day.  We students passionately rallied around him and he’s still there today, veteran of a hundred culture wars.  He was our hero.

Despite my admiration for him, I recognized that he viewed me with suspicion.  I was a little too concrete, too eager to interpret poetry rather than enjoy it, and too pragmatic about life’s demands.  I visited the school some 6 years after graduation while I was on a job interview in the city.  For most of the faculty I was a returning hero – a summa cum laude graduate of my college and current student at a top law school.  When “Mr. Keating” saw me he viewed my suit disapprovingly and asked if I had a fancy car in the parking lot.  I sensed his disappointment.  He thought I was a sellout, and I’m sure he’s not alone.  I work as a lawyer in a downtown office, commute to the suburbs, drive an SUV and increased my carbon footprint with four children.  But for reasons I’ll explain, I think he was wrong.

My reflections today are, in part, a reaction to the ethos I see developing among the generation that’s followed us.  To them, work is evil unless it’s fun.  As soon as it’s not fun, they ditch it and move on to something else.  They want to work less, have more and play all day.  They are Professor Keating’s progeny, and they view the rest of us as foolish sellouts.  If their Professor Keating made them read “1984″, they might even refer to us as unenlightened proles.  I felt like that once, but I grew out of it by the time I was 21.  This group seems stuck there, and rest of our society is bending over backward to keep them happy.

I watch these kids driving around in their new Cooper Minis and riding their tricked-out bikes, heading to a lake house that someone else paid for early on a Thursday afternoon, and wondering why the rest of the world is stupid enough to work all day and drive home in a banged up car.  I watch them and think to myself, “who paid for all of their stuff?”   

Professor Keating wasn’t the first to suggest that our our lives often fall short of their beautiful potential.   Plato reports that Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living”  (one of the many quotes that my personal Professor Keating had me memorize).  Jesus said that we were all slaves to our earthly desires, and urged us to “know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  It’s not that I reject Professor Keating’s exhortation, and certainly not Christ’s, but I think the truth lies somewhere between Alex P. Keaton’s relentless drive for success and the modern twenty-something’s expectation that they need only pursue fun and the rest will take care of itself.

At the risk of sounding immodest, I do seize the day, or at least some days.  I look back over this year and think of the time I’ve taken with my family at the expense of billable hours, the time I’ve spent in prayer, study and meditation, teaching, playing the guitar, playing with my kids, loving my wife, relishing God’s creation and serving others.   I believe that having a job and doing it well, at the occasional expense of personal desires, is a heroic thing.  I’m called to work, we all are.  I’ve laid down a part of my life to serve my family, benefit the community and  employ some of the talents that I’ve been given.  I think that working is significant, and I think that it is noble.  Pursuing a personal passion while your family starves, or expecting others who work hard to support your selfish pursuits, is not noble.  As a counterpoint, we can fail by allowing work to consume us and define us.  Once we stop appreciating beauty, and stop pursuing truth, we start dying a slow death of the soul. 

Neil Perry of the Dead Poets Society wasn’t able to simultaneously pursue his passion as an actor and vocation as a student, so he killed himself.   When I was young and first watched the movie I saw him as a tragic hero.  With 20 years of additional perspective, I see only a tragic loss.  If he’d been more patient, more balanced and more loved, he would have had a lifetime in which to pursue his passions, and figure out whether he was talented enough to make a living at acting, or whether it would remain a passionate hobby.  He didn’t seize the day, he surrendered it, and the world was a poorer place.  As this newest generation of workers experiences its first difficult days, I pray that they make wise choices and benefit from the perspective that deprivation can bring.

There are a lot of us creatives out there who feel somewhat miscast in our professions.   Most of us lack the talent to make a living at acting, writing, or other artistic pursuits, so we try to find a paying job that partially matches our interests, and we look for opportunities to engage in purely creative pursuits on our own time.  That’s how the world goes around.  I just hope that the next generation figures that out before we much-maligned Boomers and Gen X’rs are too old to keep turning the wheels.  As for the Gen X’rs long-missing source of generational angst - like of Gen Y’s maturity, it may be coming, just much delayed.

 

Escaping the DDR

It’s hard for me to believe that East Germany ceased to exist eighteen years ago.  For anyone under 25, the notion of two Germany’s separated by a hostile border is an historic anachronism.  For those of us who are a bit older, the separation of West and East Germany once seemed as permanent as the Cold War that created it.  Back then, the world’s political scene was both simpler and more terrifying.  Virtually every world conflict was a proxy war between the same two ideological combatants, and we could identify the loyalties of a soldier based on the silhouette of his rifle – it was either an American supplied M-16 or Soviet designed AK-47.  ”They” were the Evil Empire and “we” were the Defenders of Freedom.   Perhaps no place on earth was more emblematic of the tension between those antagonists than East Germany – where the once-allied, victorious armies of World War II stood within view of each other, armed for the seemingly inevitable, apocalyptic conflict to come.  Though that war never came, the two artificial Germanys competed in everything else.  The East produced steroid-enhanced athletes, while the West rebuilt glimmering cities.  Despite its success in the Olympics, most of us viewed communist Germany as the real Germany’s failed, tragicomic doppelganger to the east.

If that seems melodramatic, search your memories and read Time and Newsweek magazines from the 80’s.  I recall issues of those magazines devoted to tallying the estimated number of tanks, warheads and troops maintained by NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  I remember being anxious when reading that the Warsaw Pact tanks outnumbered NATO’s 3 to 1, or that their army was significantly larger, or that they had developed a new, superior fighter plane.  I remember one of my teachers weeping when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980’s Presidential election because she was certain that Reagan’s strong stance against communism would lead to war.  The constant specter of nuclear conflict was our reality, and we knew that Armageddon was a missile launch away.  By the 1970’s, schools has stopped teaching kids to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack, not because it was less likely, but because hiding under a desk was useless.  And we all knew it.  Security came in the form of Mutually Assured Destruction (“MAD”), the hope that no one would be crazy enough to launch an attack because it would be the end of the world.  It’s amazing the things to which you can become accustomed.

The recent German movie “The Lives of Others” artfully captures an aspect of that era.  The movie swept Germany’s cinematic awards, and went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.  The plot is set in East Germany, primarily in 1984, and follows a Stasi (secret police) agent who is ordered to spy on a playwright.  The agent is a staunch supporter of the eastern regime.  We aren’t given his age, but he was likely born around the time of the war, without any personal recollection of a unified Germany.  The movie is powerful in its subtlety.  As the protagonist observes the lives of others - thoughtful people, lovers of beauty who are tormented by the corrupt and oppressive regime under which they live, he begins to change.  Ulrich Muhe portrays the Stasi agent masterfully, and takes his character through incremental changes that alter forever the lives that he observes.  Muhe himself grew up in East Germany, and his experience certainly informed his role.  Others have written skillfully about the movie, and I won’t pretend to add to those efforts except to strongly suggest that you see the film.  Upon seeing the movie, William F. Buckley wrote “I turned to my companion and said, ‘I think that this is the best movie I ever saw.’”

The movie brought back memories of my brief time in the the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or “DDR”.  In 1985 I traveled with a group of high school and college students to Poland for a summer-long missions trip.  Poland, then also under Soviet control, had recently undergone a series of strikes and agitations for reform that led to the imposition of martial law.  “Solidarity” was the slogan of their revolution, and the stylized Solidarity logo was plastered on building facades the world over.  But to get to Poland, we traveled by train through the DDR. Though we were only supposed to be in the country for a few hours, we ended up spending two memorable days.

At the border between West and East Germany, DDR immigration officers boarded the train wearing what looked like a suitcases around their necks.  They were escorted by soldiers wearing uniforms eerily reminiscent of the German Wermacht uniforms I’d seen in a dozen WWII movies.  The “suitcases” opened and served as portable desks.  They spoke with the typically clipped tones of an immigration officer, but unlike the others I’d encountered in Luxembourg and West Germany, they made no effort to speak English and seemed intent on intimidation.  I was only 15 and was not obligated to pay a fee to get a stamp in my passport, or so I discerned through their gestures at the birth date in my passport. 

As our train probed deeper into East Germany I was stunned at the stark contrast between the West and the East.  The West had been immaculate, full of sparkling Mercedes, and dotted with exquisitely appointed houses and landscaping.  The East still seemed to bear the marks of a 40-year-old war, and the buildings were covered with a film of soot.   There were no serene, panoramic views of the countryside.  Everything was gray and industrial – smokestacks everywhere belching more of that soot into the air.  But more sobering than the condition of the buildings and the countryside was the vacant expression on every East German’s face - completely devoid of hope, seemingly unacquainted with joy.

None of us spoke much German, and somehow we ended up either boarding the wrong train or failing to change trains.  In any event, we ended up somewhere we weren’t supposed to be and disembarked only after realizing that we were quite lost.  We hadn’t eaten in some time, and rummaged through our bags for some of the food we’d brought for the summer.  We found a few items that required no preparation and ate as we sat on the train platform.  Being kids, and being Christian kids on a mission trip, we sang a song of gratitude.  When we finished, the train station was perfectly quiet.  I looked up and saw that all of the Germans on the platform were completely still, stunned and staring. 

Not long after our song, we were greeted by members of the communist red cross.  They already knew who we were and where we were supposed to be.  I don’t know if someone in the train station had called an official, or if someone had been keeping track of us all along, but they instructed us to take no pictures, escorted us to a small building, and gave us some food.  For some reason they asked us to wash our feet.  After a few hours, they escorted us to another train and sent us on our way.  I’ve never felt more observed.

We ended up in Karl Marx Stadt (which, other than from 1953-1990, has been known as the City of Chemnitz), near the Polish border.  Again, the bureaucrats with the suitcases boarded the train, but this time there were more soldiers, and several of them were managing German Shepherds.  When one of the agents reviewed my passport he flew into a rage because I didn’t have a DDR stamp, at least that’s what I discerned when he held up my passport and compared it to the passport of one of my fellow travelers who had such a stamp.  I didn’t know what to do, or how to explain that I was told that I didn’t need one, because he didn’t speak English.  One of my companions was in the same boat, so they put us in the same compartment and kept us there for what seemed forever, but was probably a half hour.  It was about 4:00 in the morning, and I was sitting in a hundred-year-old train station, pulled by an apparently antique engine, surrounded by angry soldiers dressed like extras from Kelly’s Heroes. It was surreal.  Eventually, they let us go. 

Zywiec, Poland was a much prettier, less oppressive place.  But even there, the locals wore the sad expressions of a people who had long ago stopped looking forward to tomorrow.  They were drunk whenever they could afford to be.  In a candid moment when we were hiking in the hills outside Krakow, our interpreter, a Zywiec native, told us that the deeply held hope of every Pole was that the American armies would one day come over the hills surrounding the city and free them from their oppressors.  He said he was never able to tell us that when we were in the city because he feared he was being watched.  I was sad when he told us that, because I knew it was never going to happen.

 ”The Lives of Others” reminded me that the worst elements of my brief encounters had defined the daily existence of millions for some 40 years.  Yet we seem to have very quickly forgotten how wicked things were behind the Iron Curtain.  We inexplicably deny that people are now, today, similarly oppressed in places like China and Cuba.  The chief difference between Cuba today and East Germany in 1984 is that Cuba’s people are significantly more impoverished.  Like the East Germans of 20 years ago, many are willing to risk their lives to attempt an escape.  Just a couple of weeks ago, several members of Cuba’s national soccer team disappeared during a tour of the United States.  They were presumably among the privileged in Cuba, and still they left it all because the uncertainty of hope is more appealing than the certainty of oppression. 

I am sure that there are millions wondering, like my interpreter once did, whether their liberators will one day arrive.  While I neither expect nor advocate direct military action against those remaining vestiges of a failed ideology, I fear that we’ve stopped believing that we really do have something better to offer, and so we’ve stopped applying the pressure that once led to the collapse of the Eastern Block and the end of the seemingly permanent Cold War.  Our popular culture has decided that patriotism is comically naive, that we are the oppressors, and that it is presumptuous to suggest that our system is better than anyone else’s.  We may all suffer for that one day, but for now, the ones who suffer most are the ones who know best that our America really is worth preserving, because they are living the nightmarish alternative.