Find something to hold onto as 2020 slips away, Tampa Bay
We were learning about the First World War in history class right before our world collapsed.
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We were studying the imperialization and militarization that led to war, the deaths that came from it and the deals made to end it.
We took the unit test on the day before we were let go for spring break, and we didn’t come back.
We lost the school year. We lost graduation parties. We lost the in-person connection with teachers and peers. We lost learning as we knew it.
I’ve been thinking about that word: lost.
The phrase “The Lost Generation,” was coined by Gertrude Stein, who heard it used by a garage owner in France when a young mechanic took too long to fix a car. The mechanic called the young people who lived through the Great War and the influenza outbreak in 1918 “une génération perdue.” The phrase was popularized by Ernest Hemmingway, but “The Lost Generation” also includes Stein and T.S. Eliott and F. Scott Fitzgerald, American writers whose work we still read and study a full century later.
My English class started reading Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” when we resumed school online in March. My teacher did her best to explain the Roaring ‘20s and how the young people of that time lived—recklessly, carelessly and aimlessly, partying, drinking and spending money. They had survived the WWI and a pandemic that killed a third of the world’s population. They had beaten death, and so they lived completely in the moment, she said, having been stripped of the illusion of democracy and of hope for peace.
I was 15 when the pandemic started. I’m 16 now and will turn 18 before it’s over, if predictions are correct. My generation is also coming of age during a time of chaos and grief. We are disoriented and lost, draped in a blanket of anxiety and hopelessness.
Maybe history repeats itself; perhaps that’s our only salvation.
If 2020 is the year where everything is shaken around and flipped upside down, then 2021 will be the year of creation. After any national crisis come heroes, art and maybe something beautiful, something that will last beyond our own lives. The Black Death of the 14th century made way for the Renaissance. The Thirty Years War preceded the Enlightenment. And as Hemmingway quotes from the book of Ecclesiastes, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh but the Earth abideth forever.”
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View this story in the Creative Loafing on page 8 here
The editor of a local tabloid asked me to write a reflection on the year at the end of 2020. It was a horrible year for me, but I decided I didn't want to focus on that. I remembered thinking about the ironies and the parallels between what we were studying in school at the time the pandemic started, wondering if that was going to be us. I can say that, in Florida, having made it through 2021 as well, that it was. People stopped caring about the pandemic at a certain point and now everyday feels like a Gatsby party. Maybe we will be the new lost generation.
I took some inspiration for the mood of this piece from an editorial I wrote at the beginning of the year with observations collected from the entire staff called "What Its Like." View it on page 10 here.