the fashion.

Re: Battlecry

Dear Generation,

Allow me to introduce myself. I was born in the mid-eighties. Twenty-two years later, I earned a college degree in liberal idealism. For a few misguided years, I believed in the power of politics to act in the interest of humanity and the planet we live on. I have a sick haircut and sometimes have sex with strangers. I have a maxxed out and “delinquent” credit card thanks to copious amounts beer and a few groceries, a credit card that I obtained because my grandfather served in our country’s military (irony’s a bitch).  I understand how the world works and I have a million great ideas to fix it. I just had an interview for a barrista job.

 I, you might say, am you.

During my interview for this barrista job, my college thesis and the hours I spent writing it, and the passion for a better world that I was (oh so naively) sure I’d be able to apply toward fulfilling my my basic needs was flooding my brain. Admittedly, my college thesis proposed no less than reversing the rotation of the earth, but I was interested in achieving nothing less than exactly that;  isn’t capitalism the system that allows nefarious (don’t tell me they’re not) bankers on Wall Street to turn profits of billions while a Haiti that’s been granted the honor of poorest country in the western hemisphere by IMF and World Bank, the shrewd architects of a truly monstrous economic disparity we like to call “the way the world works”, has suffered needless loss of life at a volume we can’t possibly comprehend.

At 18, between high school and college, I got a job as a waitress. I worked with a 67 year old woman who reminded us daily that she’d been working in restaurants since she was thirteen. My completely undue sympathy extended toward her while reassuring me that the time and money would indeed be worth spending on a college career. So I majored in Ways The World Will End Very Soon with a minor in How You Can’t Really Fix It (when a fellow Reagan’s Kid says, “Existential environmentalists have the least fun out of everyone in the world,” you know she’s right). So now, I’m applying for a barrista job while being told that it is truly a very demanding job, one which will in all likelihood demand all of my skills and mental capacity. And I’ll be damn lucky if I get it.

It goes without saying that I’ve seen a million of my friends move home after trying to “make it work” on their wits and wiles, like they’d always been told they could.

So, Reagan’s Kids, what’s the way out? Marx said that a truly evolved humanity would possess the capacity for empathy and compassion, and that’s something that still seems to evade us. It’s certainly a challenge but isn’t the course of human history defined by evolution and adaptation to what’s demanded of us?

So, going back to that whole reversal of the earth’s rotation thing, why not try something new and care for one another like we care for ourselves? Pool resources, share, help. We were born into an age defined by gross materialism and excess, selfishness and myopia. Let’s look at the way the world was built, stop using it as an excuse and start re-arranging it.

Ideas very welcome.

GET MADE OUT WITH.

do u want MORE???!!??

ok.

Contextual Human Interaction™ // BATTLECRY

The modern world tends to hurt my feelings a lot. This is never more obvious than when I’m back home just tryna legitimize my life choices to my parents, who unfortunately are on the uglier side of a huge generational divide and therefore can not understand why I have near-constant panic attacks over their decisions to use paper towels and buy conventional beef. Therefore, I’ve developed a tactic I’m calling Contextual Human Interaction™ (CHI) to deal with such situations, therefore avoiding any awkward car rides where you burst into tears at your mom’s suggestion that you get a job at KOHL’S.

Essentially, CHI is based on the idea that in order to fully maximize the benefits of healthy and happy interpersonal human relationships, we must be willing to contextualize our fellow humans using their personal histories, beliefs, and experiences, and to base our interactions with them on our understanding of who they truly Are. Not only that, but we must consider the geo-political, socio-economic, historical and cultural events that have shaped their view of the world and therefore their view of themselves if we are ever to reach a common ground or truly communicate with one another. This takes a lot of work. However, understanding the context of those around you is crucial to maintaining your own levels of self-awareness and understanding your own context, which in turn will allow you to believe more deeply in yourself and your life path, especially if you’ve chosen an alternative system of beliefs than your parents or the majority of modern Americans.

Reagans Kids is about contextualizing ourselves in order to progress; meditating on our basest fears, desires, and self-doubts as a means of recognizing them when they attempt to get in the way of making proactive social or personal change. It is about embracing that we are by and large the offspring of hopeful, hardworking Boomers who have grown up to be wary of everything our parents worked so hard for, and for good reason.

Baby toys are toxic. Your pillow is giving you cancer. People are still whaling, for fuck’s sake.

And so on.

It is about embracing that it is okay to feel wary, that we are not ungrateful or unproductive or too young.

Contextualizing our frustration, our fear, our irrationality, and our unending hope makes me feel like we have the ability to either collapse in despair or to start over and build something truly new and beautiful and unique. We have been witnessing the slow downfall of the American Dream since we were babies and luckily for us, we don’t have to believe in it anymore.

Fuck yr desk job.

We know who we are.

Take that shit and spin it into ART.

FDR’s Kids

excerpt, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, 1941

rebel, re-shape

“… the beat generation, by whatever name it is called, is the natural expression of our times, international in character and deeply rooted in the chaos of our society. For all his faults, the hipster is a hero of our times because he has rebelled against a society which is only rational but no longer sane, a society which, because it has divorced man from its intuitive self, can talk calmly of waging nuclear war. The hipster’s ability to act spontaneously in a society which demands conformity is in itself an affirmation of the ability of the human being to will its own actions.”

–David McReynolds

WE

are looking for

compadres, contributors, ideas, supplies, time,  solutions, space, love, you.

contact emily or kelly at reaganskids@gmail.com with any/all/more of the above.

As Ronald Reagan once said, “It’s morning in America.”