Saga: The 13th Generation

1995 was a very bad year for me. By all accounts, it shouldn't have been. I had managed to survive in a PhD program I honestly had no right to be in, and generous people trusted me to teach my undergraduate classes in my own eccentric way. 

The problem was never professional. It was personal. I did manage fairly well with the teaching, and they even gave me an office with a window, but I was completely lost within myself. It was Year Three of the Wilderness Years, of being completely alone, and it was the time I began to realize that the Black Dog wasn't just a temporary bad mood. It was going to be a lifelong struggle of facing the sort of internal pain most people could gladly never relate to.

Someone showed up at that office one day, and the details hardly matter anymore. Within a week, I was a ball of jelly. I lost my job, my education, the respect of others, and, most importantly, my own self-respect. Three years of building things up were shattered from the experience of a matter of minutes.

It would have been easy to blame others, but I knew I had only myself to blame. I began to rebuild, so very slowly, and one small part of that seems like a very silly ritual. Every week I would go to the old Tower Records on Newbury Street, and buy myself a new record. It became like a stop on a pilgrimage, every Tuesday afternoon.

In the middle of a hot July, I picked up the new album by one of my old favorites, the Canadian progressive rock band Saga, titled Generation 13. I still remember that moment I first played it. I was struck by something I had never really thought too much about. What did it mean for me to be a member of my "generation", and how was my generation different from those that came before me?

It's too easy to say that the past was better, or to say that the present is better. The reality is that we will all struggle with exactly the same problems, all in our own ways. I don't believe humanity and civilization necessarily get better or worse.

But I did notice something about the crowd I had grown up with, the one Saga called "Generation 13", and it was that so many of us so were so inherently self-absorbed. Our grandparents had won the War, and our parents had benefited from all the spoils. Now here we were, entitled, totally clueless, and worried not with matters of life or death, or of right or wrong, but of convenience or inconvenience.

Surely, a man suffering from clinical depression will take this as an excuse to complain about the state of the world.

Actually, that young fool saw something else. He thought about how he could be different, not like the herd, and regardless of time or place, he could do his small bit in making things right.

I still listen to this song not as a downer, but as an upper. Yes, I may well see the horrors around me. All generations have seen that. Now how I can I live to stand against the wind?

Saga, "The 13th Generation", from Generation 13 (1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGW4B0ouGhE

The year is 1945
And number 12 has now arrived
This is where we all came from
Can you undo what we have done?
It's time to face our own worst fears
The 13th generation's here
And what you see is what you get
So take a seat we're not done yet

So here we are!
We've reached the top floor
We've pushed all the buttons
There aren't any more
Do you think it's time
That we all took a break?
Or maybe we should cross our fingers
And sit here and wait
Now that you're here
Did you think there was more?
Hey! Get those grubby fingers
Away from that door
Why are you standing there
Wearing that frown?
We've got somewhere to go
We can all go down!

 The year is 1945
And number 12 has now arrived
This is where we all came from
Can you undo what we have done?
It's time to face our own worst fears
The 13th generation's here
And what you see is what you get
So take a seat we're not done yet

And now that you've had
The ride of your life
Have you got any questions
I don't charge for advice
Why are you standing there
Wearing that frown?
We've got somewhere to go
We can all go down!

After 1944
Number 11 ends the war
This is where we all came from
Can you undo what we have done
It's time to face our own worst fears
The 13th generation's here
And what you see is what you get
So take a seat, we're not done yet

Written in 2/2002