I recall being in eighth grade and going through "Sex Ed." Although we all enjoyed the rousing lessons on what "popping a cherry" really means and why you should ALWAYS wash yourself down there, the guidance counselor, who had had the Sex Ed job for decades, was struck by how uninterested we all were in the subject. In fact, that was to be the story of my peers from middle school, into high school, and finally into college. The guidance counselor called us the most apathetic class she had ever seen. That we really weren't troublemakers, but we weren't ambitious either—we were just sort of there.

Now at 24, my generation—the people I grew up with and know—are accomplishing surprisingly little. Some have graduated college, but the degree does little more than hang half-cocked on the wall in between posters of Weezer and N-Sync. Are we the new Lost Generation, a truly bewildered group of people with no interests, no direction, minds numbed by over-exposure to violence, sex, and breakfast-cereal commercials?

I think of that gargantuan generation, the generation that currently rules the world—the Baby Boomers. Like the fallout from the nuclear blast that preceded their births, they have exploded and spread to all levels of power in our society. What were they doing when they were our age? Some were involved in the counter-culture movement of the sixties, protested the Vietnam War, or took over their campus. To contrast, the current Baby Boomer to beat, George w. Bush, was a senior at Yale. Every Thursday and Sunday, he attended the super-secret meetings of the super-secret Skulls and Bones society. Inside its windowless house, which is called the "Tomb," he and his prep-school buddies conducted rituals and rites, and gave oaths of silence about everything they saw and did.

Both of those groups have something in common that many researchers are speculating is slowly reaching extinction in modern colleges: They DID something. There was a time; it seems, when the youth of America just took things a lot more seriously. And that might seem to be the opposite of the way things SHOULD be. How can it be that in this world of terror, my peers simply don't care? The answer seems so simple.

A friend of mine and myself one time went around and asked random people of our own age if they believed in God. The most common answer? "I don't know." We then got the bright idea to ask people if they ever thought they would know the answer to the question for sure sometime in the future, the most common answer? "I don't know." Yo no se.

The idea started to develop in my mind that perhaps we were striking something a little different than apathy. These people weren't just saying, "I don't know" to get us out of their faces. Instead my fellow Y-ians stood firmly in their belief that not only didn't know, they probably aren't going to find out anytime soon.

Perhaps it was the cold-war bomb scares from our childhood, or maybe seeing our greatest threat then, the Soviet Union, crumble. Maybe it was the daily reminders that the ozone is disappearing, global warming is coming, eggs give you cancer; and Americans were becoming the fattest people on Earth. Maybe it was the Oklahoma City bombing, the school shootings, or September 11. Maybe it was the images from Somalia, Kosovo, or Bosnia transported to us instantly over satellites and Internet cables. Maybe it's the corporate scandals, the robbed elections, or the five hundred and fifty channels all playing the same stupid commercial that is so obviously geared towards us that it becomes a joke. Maybe, maybe it's reality television.

All I know is that somewhere along the way we figured out the real problem. For some reason everything seemed to point towards us freaking out, for us to adopt a desperate way of looking at the world, an obsession with the invisible enemy always "out there" somewhere. The criminals on the streets, the drug-dealers in our backyards, the terrorists in the sky above our heads and the anonymous substances that could be killing us as we speak; but instead we saw that that fear, that was being perpetuated, was the real source of the problem. All our lives it seemed like everyone was always on Red Alert whether they announced it or not.

This is what we are not: We are not radicals, we are not zealots. We aren't revolutionaries or warmongers. We wait patiently for the old ways to die out or kill themselves with their own venomous fumes. We know the difference between a belief and an idea. Beliefs kill, ideas change. We aren't Republicans and we aren't Democrats, we're not liberal or conservative, because we see that those concepts have been tossed around so much they have come to mean nothing.

But most importantly we know where things went wrong. The one thing my generation seems to grasp is that we are all confused. None of us knows exactly what is right, and what is wrong. We go out and we try to do what's best. Some times we get it right, some time we're not so lucky. But it's important to remember the reality of our situation. No one is perfect, nothing is flawless. That opens the door to debate, to conjecture.