I, dear readers, have been in training all day. As for tomorrow, I will be in training all day. What kind of training, you ask? Well, maybe you don't ask, but I'll tell you anyway. Situational Self-Leadership. Doesn't that sound like fun? I didn't think so either. Doesn't that sound like a corporate assimilation technique? Damn skippy. I am getting some useful information from it, though, such as the basics of juggling, and a nifty card trick. Our instructor, it seems, is a bit of a showman at heart.

Over the weekend I watched "The Day After" the other night on the SciFi Channel. I was about ten years old the first time that movie was broadcast. I remember it well. It was an event. We were encouraged to watch it. Older students at my school were even made to write papers about it. My family sat glued to the television and watched the horror of a hypothetical nuclear war graphically played out, then we sat around reassuring ourselves that something like that would never be allowed to happen. I still had nightmares.

Almost twenty years later, with the cold war nothing but a bad memory, I decided to watch it again, thinking it would be a nice little piece of 80's nostalgia (imagine getting nostalgic about the threat of nuclear war). I thought it would be fun to laugh at the bad hair, the silly clothes, the bad acting, and how stupid everything about the Reagan-era was. From the opening credits, I knew I'd thought wrong.

For a TV movie, it had a rather impressive cast. It was directed by Nicholas Meyer, who, among other things, wrote and/or directed all of the best Star Trek movies. This was no movie-of-the-week, my friends. This was more like a movie-of-the-decade. Again, I was riveted. And again, I was horrified by what I saw. And again, I was freaked out by the message at the end that stated that the movie had actually portrayed an unrealistically optimistic view of what might happen in the event of a nuclear war.

I sat there after it was over and reassured myself that the cold war is over, that the threat has been abated, and that they would never really allow anything like that to happen. I went to bed, and had nightmares.

The next day, I heard some political pundit talking about low voter turnout and trying to blame it on my generation, going on and on about how apathetic and self-centered we are. Us damn lazy slacker Gen X-ers with our dotcom franchizes and our disregard for the way our parents did things. And it occurred to me: we were brought up to be nihilists, to believe that the world could end any minute with the push of a single button, that we didn't have any future to speak of.

So is it any wonder that we came to be people who live in the now, who don't put a whole lot of stock in planning ahead? Many of us had already reached adulthood by the time the USSR disbanded and the world's sense of impending doom abated. Even then, our entire lives had been lived under the threat of WWIII, so it took us a while to believe that it was really over. Once the reality sunk in, in between the fall of the Berlin wall and the mainstreaming of the Internet, suddenly we had an entire generation of young adults with no direction for the future. Thank God for the Internet, is all I can say. It gave us a future, something we could grab onto and make our own.

I think, all things considered, we've done a pretty good job at finding our own direction, since there wasn't really anyone to provide it for us as with previous generations. Worrying about and planning for the future is still a fairly new concept for us. As we become more accustomed to it, and as our optimism increases, perhaps our apathy will continue to fade.

This isn't a "Boo hoo, the baby boomers with their drugs and their bombs and their free love screwed everything up for us so why should we even be expected to bother" speech. Well, maybe it is, to an extent; but I don't think we shouldn't be expected to bother. What bothers me is that we are constantly expected NOT to bother, even though we often DO bother when we feel it necessary. We're not as dramatic about it, we don't stage big protests, because frankly, nothing we have to protest is that big. We've got it pretty good, and as we grow older and wiser, we're beginning to realize it, and to appreciate it, and to understand that we'd better get off our asses and get involved if we want to keep it that way.

So if I hear one more aging hippy turned politician bitching and moaning about how my generation doesn't realize how good we've got it and how we're lazy, apathetic freeloaders, I'll ... well, I'll probably just bitch about it some more, actually. That's one thing Generation X is good at. We've raised the art of bitching and moaning to a lifestyle, and nobody can take that away from us. We may be a generation of inactivists, but by God, we care enough about the world around us to complain loudly about it. So stick that in your bong and smoke it.