from the Blue Area of the Moon
While I don’t have much to say on the explicit topic at hand in this post from slacktivist, I can say that every time I’ve ever found myself in a similar position than Fred describes, I felt at least, if not more (given the fact that I didn’t grow up in the Evangelical subculture) uncomfortable.
What I really want to point out from the piece is the paragraph quoted below, which really gets to the heart of the worldview of a lot of people my age and a little bit older:
And that’s when it hit me. Unlike everyone else in that room, I really was having the ultimate Gen-X worship experience. I had become a detached observer — standing apart from the others, from the music, even from myself. What could be more of a Gen-X experience than being self-conciously aware of your self-consciousness about your self-consciousness?
That’s really so much of the experience of being of a certain generation (though most of us aren’t comfortable with the labels so much anymore). Not everyone, of course, but a lot of us.
I could go into a deep, involved socio-historical explanation of where that cynical, introspective detachment comes from (and believe me, I really, really could), but really, it’s one of those things that if you’re going to get it, that statement is enough, and if you’re not going to understand, all the explanation in the world isn’t going to help.
