You found this child, so raise him

Somehow, at some point, and despite vehement declarations to the contrary when I was ten, I've become a coffee drinker. Regular coffee consumption is one of those things, like being a circus freak or alcoholic, that no one really plans to do. I know my dad started when he was in the Navy, which is why he drinks it black (like a man). Other people do it for the bohemian cool factor, and I imagine those are also the people who pick up smoking and irritating theological views.

I put the blame for my caffeine consumption on the fact that my Sense Of Social Norms says that it's inappropriate to meet up with someone to sit around and talk without also traveling somewhere else. My dominant high school social activity was meeting friends for dates at coffee houses, and my miserliness led me to eventually ditching expensive noncaffienated/ultrasugared espresso drinks in favor of regularly buying the cheapest thing on the menu, which is coffee. It's really just the coffee shop that I like. Coffee itself was the tag along younger sibling that eventually got accepted into the group out of sheer repeated association.

As noble and socially-based as my introduction to the Starbucks world was, my love affair with coffee houses has gone on long enough that I can fully recognize it as a guilty pleasure. A part of me feels skeezy every time I shell out $2.00 to consume what I could get just as easily from a Mr. Coffee, a little effort, and $.02 worth of grounds. But I'm not really paying for the coffee; I'm paying for being allowed the opportunity to sit in a paradise of trendy modern art and balsa wood and pretend like everyone in the world gets to live the Ikea dream. Sitting in the hallmark of materialistic corporate America drinking gratuitous caffeine and talking about unspecified things with a good friend is both one of the most disgusting moral sins and the ultimate luxury. Besides, how else am I supposed to know what music to buy?

In the end, the world comes down to just a few people

I feel like if the American public were be polled to define the greatest overriding fault of my generation, the biggest piece of the pie graph would be "apathy and immaturity." Whether or not various statistics actually support that charge, I get the impression that, especially in comparison to more riotous generations of the past, Generation Y is largely characterized by our tendency to, in the face of crisis, say "meh," blog about it, and take a nap. Growing up, we were spoiled like no other generation (according to Wikipedia, the millennial generation was definitively started when "Baby on Board" signs appeared in car windows), and our lives have been cushioned by technology, taking away otherwise more laborious effort and conditioning us for immediacy. Most would fail to recognize those qualities as actual problems, though. Impatience and indifference, though not virtues, aren't particularly dangerous attributes.

That being said, I think that mindset can be horribly misleading. Something is seriously wrong with us, probably linked to our apathy, in a way that is totally and undeniably dangerous. After all these recent school shootings, I can't see how we can go on thinking that people my age are being calmly swept through the modern era. In the United States, only 8 school shootings were ever recorded by 1989. Between 1990 and today, 38 more have occurred, in cities spanning from California to Vermont. Five shootings were reported in the last two weeks. Something has happened to us, specifically, in a different way than any other generation, and along with fostering apathy and childishness, it's made us murderous.

I know it's hasty and unfair to argue that the roughly 45 people who brought guns to school indicate an epidemic failing in an entire American generation, but I think it's reasonable and justifiable to be concerned. People my age like to compare ourselves to the baby boomer hippies of the 60's, and I'd hate to think that we've taken whatever revolutionary spirit we inherited from them and, instead of fighting inequality or The Man, turned it against ourselves.