Anti-Anti-Everything

It reached its height in the 90s. It got so bad, you couldn't have a conversation without thinking about it. It became second nature to us -- we didn't know how to communicate with each other without it.

Cynicism. Pessimism. Irony. Sarcasm. These were the only tools we had to express an opinion.

At some point, everything became bad. Not really, of course, but you would have thought so to hear people talk. The best compliment we could come up with was, "It doesn't suck." Occasionally, if we were brave and very, very sure that the person we were talking to agreed with us, we might say, "It actually wasn't that bad."

We were afraid to like things. Because people who hated things were always superior to those who liked things. If I liked something and you didn't, clearly you were smarter than me. Clearly, you had better taste than I did. "You like that?" you could say, showing that you held the upper hand.

And really, what was there to like? The Star Wars movies that thrilled us through our youth were over. In their place, we had an endless stream of violent and/or dark Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Instead of hilarious movies like Ghostbusters, we had Ghostbusters II. The newest thing in sci-fi was "cyberpunk." We were told that style was more important than substance -- and it showed.

But now, things are changing. Slowly but surely, things are getting better. The Harry Potter books (and now the movie) made us focus on feeling young and open-minded. The new Lord of the Rings movies look so good, we're all holding our breaths in anticipation. Like suddenly seeing a wild animal in the woods, we're too scared to even breathe for fear that the sound will scare it away and the magic will be over. Our old cynical selves are telling us not to get our hopes up -- that way, if they're good, we'll be pleasantly surprised, and if they're bad, we won't be disappointed. Yet our more childish, optimistic selves secretly hope they are as good as it looks like they might be. Because you know what? It's fun to look forward to things. It's fun to be excited again, rather than dour and pessimistic.

Of course, in some ways things are getting worse. But strangely, that's helping too: Some things are just too awful to be cynical about. When thousands die in a single day due to a terrorist attack, the only response that can keep us sane is optimism, support, and strength. We watch people singing "God Bless America" and we don't make cynical quips, we feel moved. In America, it's okay to be sentimental, touching, and patriotic again.

Writer Grant Morrison observed back in the late 1990s (I'm paraphrasing here) that as we approach the end of the decade, the century, and the millennium, things seemed bleaker and bleaker. Of course conspiracies and paranoia were popular (witness The X-Files): things were bleak. Everything we knew and understood, psychologically, was coming to an end with the close of the millennium. But as we pass through the coming of the new era, who knows what will happen? People, at the beginning of a decade, a century -- a whole new millennium, for Pete's sake -- tend to look forward.

Hopefully, with optimism.