There isn't much about baby-boomers that I envy. I'm sure that they had some great times back in the 60's and 70's (as they constantly remind us), but I'm also sure that free love and experimentation with psychedelic drugs couldn't have been all it's cracked up to be. In spite of their constant attempts to have a good time at all costs, they certainly lived through a great deal of tragedy.

I don't envy them all of their touchstones: those cultural events which become frozen like a snapshot into the memories of the masses. Sharing a common memory is a powerful, generation-defining thing.

My own generation has plenty of these moments too: The Challenger explosion, Kurt Cobain's suicide, and, of course, the big one. But all of the memories that we will take with us into the future seem to have one thing in common. They are all tragedies.

Of these rare events, the ones worthy of the question, "Do you remember where you where when...?" there is one big, triumphant moment which everyone who witnessed it still remembers. Everyone who was alive (and in America) at the time remembers where they were and what they were doing when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon. This moment belongs to the Boomers. They all have their stories about it, whether they were just sitting at home in their pajamas watching it with their parents, or horrified when they woke up the next morning, realizing that they had missed it.

I envy them this moment. It may not make all of the other things they had to deal with worthwhile, but it is a brilliant, bright spot in an otherwise traumatic decade. The only things that my generation will carry with it are the memories of sadness and tragedy, and the constant approbation heaped upon us by the Baby-Boomers.

But there is revenge in youth. Someday, everyone who watched the Moon landing, as it happened, will be dead. It will exist only as a few paragraphs in history books, and the flickering, grainy, distorted images, shown on television with greater and greater infrequency. And then the whole event will have the same emotional impact on those forced to learn about it as the landing on Plymouth Rock, or the Wright brothers' first flight.

It might only be vaguely remembered, but it will never be forgotten. However, rest assured that the neglect and mistrust inflicted by the Boomers on their decedents will be paid in full in the future as they find themselves utterly forgotten, like the thousands of generations of human beings who came before them. After you are gone, we won't tell our grandchildren, or our great-grandchildren about you.

Our generation is already forgotten, and we're still here; You Baby-Boomers -- you'll soon be dust, and fall into the oblivion which you created for your children. Enjoy the Social Security that we bought you.

-B. C. Silvia