(Don't) Beat on the Brats with a Baseball Bat

You know, I don't totally hate the younger generation. I do not take kindly to people being all flagrant about bad taste, which happens a lot down our way, but I have taken kindly to these two fourteen-ish-year-olds who I often see on the train going to and from school. They are a gangly, unconventionally pretty girl and a super cute black boy with an afro and a skateboard. They're clearly sweet on each other, but they play it pretty cool--no gross, underaged displays of affected affection. Mainly, I like how they dress, in brazen jewel-toned denims and backpacks, clean t-shirts, and sneaks, none of the curated rapscallion tatters and glamorous in-line-for-the-Dole ensembles that we favor. They choose new-ness, where we choose vintage. It seems to me that, for the first time in a while, there is an actual teeny-bopper and a teeny-bopper style. Looking at them, I feel as if we, at fourteen-ish, always tried to look older (and smuttier), and they allow themselves to revel in their particular age of school clothes and mall clothes and movie-going clothes.

More importantly, the two of them are equipped almost identically. I have often decried gender neutralizing as handled by the clumsy fashion industry, but in the hands of these kids, as with their seemingly easy, unself-conscious mixed race coupling (unheard of where I come from), it's part of a true, unfettered sense of equality (they both happen to decorate their knapsacks with Obama/Biden pins). Electing Obama was exciting for those of us who voted, but imagine the faith in others instilled in kids who had no agency, who saw the citizens and system they will be and inherit work for the better. When I was their age, it was the 2000 election that I witnessed (ugh). These kids love the environment and believe in the efficacy of diversity. They're a bit less likely to smoke cigarettes (which is good for them, I guess). In making that list, I realize that we were supposed to possess those three traits; all were heavily marketed to us in school and on television. But it's a process, and in that way, younger people have come closer than we could have.

Really, all of this kid propering aside, I think I like that I can look at them and feel out of it (their world), old enough to see them as children and be kindly and a little maternal.

Miley Cyrus on the other hand . . .