Everyone Dreads a Sequel

History is repeating itself, but this time its echo is all too familiar.

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Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine this week brings with it a chilling, global sensation. There is no longer peace across Europe, and from our wealthy, ensconced villas in the States, there seems to be very little we can do about it beyond lobbing sanctions or offering a milquetoast saber rattle.

This new war–a term I’m still wrapping my head around–offers up another curious generational fold for we baby X-ers (or, conversely, geriatric millennials, another term demanding grave pause). Russia as warmongering adversary–sounds familiar, right?

I am old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I knew Mikhail Gorbachev’s name as a kid, and Boris Yeltsin’s. I studied in schools that had window shade-style maps with “U.S.S.R.” printed broadly across their northeastern quadrants. In my memory, the country was a deep shade of red.

Generationally speaking, I occupy a sweet spot in this story. If you’re much older than I am, you probably practiced “Duck and Cover” type school drills and lived with a low-level humming anxiety, waiting for the bright flash from Moscow. If you’re a decade younger than me, you’ve lived your life in a post-Cold War channel, one defined by the wealthy confidence portrayed by a strong America guiding another defeated nation into the democratic herd. That small span of time in the middle, my group, has a foot on both sides.

Although I cannot attribute the quote, I remember reading somewhere that society makes adults when it needs them. The line was a reaction of sorts to the perceived inability of the millennial generation to function like grown-ups: the postponement in moving out of one’s parental household, the arrival of “starter” jobs and starter marriages, the psycho-social arrest that created the quarter life crisis.

This litter-wide developmental delay was attributed, then, to the notion that our world had yet to present us an Existential Challenge. The children of the 80s and 90s had no Great Depression or World War. There was no conscription calling the boys off to distant shores. Instead, we grew our muscles underneath cable-knit sweaters from the GAP. We played with G.I. Joe figures on the way to the multiplex to catch the latest sequel.

By the time we talked ourselves into a conflict in the post 9/11 years, our country’s privilege meant that most of us didn’t know the men and women doing the fighting. By that point, we were grasping at the next rung on the ladder as fast as we could, rarely pausing to look back down.

Whatever imagined coziness we thought we might have was bludgeoned by the pandemic, which has delivered us all into what is likely the great war for our generation. I’d say our collective response is evidence enough of how well prepared we were for it.

Now a new war in Europe shakes us from our slumbering repose. It seems a few of us in the Baby Xers/Geriatric Millennials wing are beginning to understand the emergent tranquility of our young adulthood was all an illusion. Those of you who know me and believe me to be an optimist might be troubled to hear me say that. It’s troubling for me to write it.

This isn’t an abandonment of my belief in humanity or my insistence that we are created in the image of God and possess an instinctive will for good. That underwrites my faith.

However the authoritative book about my faith is filled with stories that serve as examples that none of us were promised easy roads. For every servant turned master, a king or kingdom falls. For every promise of riches, more stories are spun from poverty’s clutches. Darkness is relentless and consuming, making light all the more precious.

For grownups my age, though, this ought to serve as a reckoning. Our parents’ generation know our global foe quite well, but nothing suits my generation better than watching a sequel.

When I was in college, some friends and I published a zine that lasted roughly one semester and printed only three or four issues, almost all of which appeared in the year following September 11, 2001. I remember we produced a full-page spread of sorts that simply read NO WAR. We wanted to be serious at the time, to invent some kind of friction as our country slipped into conflict with Iraq. In hindsight, it seems like a plaything–a zine, made from a Word document, replicated on a library copier, distributed among friends or maybe “strategically placed” on a coffee table in the English department.

Now, I reconcile my youthful peacenik tendencies against videos of Ukrainian fathers kissing their daughters goodbye, sending them away on a bus while they stay behind to defend their country. Is it surprising for me to feel hawkish in such a moment?

Society makes grownups when it needs them. Friends, perhaps it’s time.