Taipei Eats
Point Pleasant, NJ
So I’m actually in Taiwan for a few weeks right now, but have spent the last month and a half back home in Jersey. I grew up 20 minutes from the ocean, but my parents were never really beach people so we never really took advantage. I decided I really should take the summer and check out all the beaches nearby. Point Pleasant beach’s about 30 min away, it’s got a nice boardwalk, but the sand’s just so so.
End the University as We Know It 
My Generation
I think phillylo is right on point:Generation Xmsnbc ran an interesting article on the impact of the current economic calamity on Gen X’ers—however they might define themselves. as much as i resist generational labels, i found myself identifying with the described demographic.
during my church lay leadership class in the fall, there was an interesting cultural divide between a few elderly white women taking the class and the young Asian males that were also in attendance. attempting to explain something that lay in our generational differences, i offered an explanation. “we think that the world you gave us has betrayed us,” i said in so many words. “we don’t trust the government, the world order, or the religion that you’ve given us.” that was painful for one of the women in particular, who has experienced brokenness in her relationship with a daughter of my age. as severe as the comment did seem at the time, i felt that it was honest. i think that to understand something about my generation, one has to recognize that our cynicism is not an ideology, in the way that the feminists, the civil rights people, and the anti-war activists had “ideology”. our cynicism is a profoundly rational response to what we have seen; our disenchantment is built on justifiable indignation.
according to the article, American Gen Xers do not believe that “the world or anyone” will take care of them. it’s not merely a post-adolescent identity crisis. after all, take stock of what we’ve seen. we traded one phantom war, the “Cold War”, for another phantom war, “the war on terror”. we’ve endured two Republican presidents who filled our lives with sixteen years of rhetoric directed against “evil empires” of one kind or another, while genocides continue unabated in forgotten areas of the world. the “war on drugs”, the “war on poverty”—these are wars we can’t win. i grew up watching Lebanon turn to rubble. now i get to watch Baghdad and Gaza go through the same makeover.
the Boomers have Vietnam as their defining moment—the one thing that they can rally around, the focal crisis of their conscience. but Gen Xers have seen so many Vietnam imbroglios rise and fade in succession that the collective futility of it is not the exception; it is the rule. the bust-and-bubble economic cycle that we have inherited and perhaps helped to create is distressing but hardly surprising to us. there is something fundamentally unsound and even sick about the world order that we live in. the modernists believe in progress, but the only evidence we have of this is the ipod and the internet. the irony is that our technological progress—and the globalization of information—has all the more exposed how social progress is an illusion.
the culture of Gen X interests me because it is shaping the church. if i am any representative of the Gen X church, then i’m tired of mixing church and politics. i go to church to seek community, not dogma and certainly not demagoguery. my spirituality is personal, and it is not enriched by institutional membership. i have been inundated by rallying cries regarding the unreached in the 10/40 window, but i am equally impressed by the spiritual poverty of Western Christendom. well-intentioned white and Asian people go to Africa and Central Asia to palliate their conscience and to escape the mediocrity of their lives; they find the rest of the world nearly as humanistic as the corrupt civilization they left behind. “unreached” is a speculative idea. the Rwandan in an internet cafe is no less unreached than the Wall Street executive contemplating suicide. we mourn the thousands of people groups in this world who have no Bible in their language, but privately we struggle to believe that any of our efforts really matter. the third world starves for lack of stable government and self-sufficient economies; they don’t starve for lack of compassion.increasingly, i think that the American church will discover that its primary calling is to engage the young in their own country. the cynicism of Gen X is fostering a materialistic egocentrism in the newest generation. i can’t understand the new youth; and i don’t like them either. but they are an extension of what i have been through, in that my sense of failure has translated to their utter apathy. the new America we are creating is increasingly uninterested in the plights of civilization or the idea of utopia. the new America is fed up with truth in its various and subjective forms. what we want here and now is health. we want to eat food that won’t kill us. we want to invest in things that won’t scam us. we want to be with people who won’t shove their agendas onto us. outside of that, we’ll do anything—bikram yoga, meditation, acupuncture, or LSD—to get well.
can American Christians be well? can they live something unpresuming yet vital? can they create a community that lives and breathes like a city on a hill, a new Jerusalem? can they offer a true alternative to the theology of the past, the ideological basis of our crumbling capitalism? i want to believe that we can stop aspiring to be fake crusaders and instead rediscover the one thing that makes us different from everyone else: life.
