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| Yellow Crocs and Shifting Pronouns It’s popular to describe the current crop of young things as the ME generation, a generation that’s firmly located in the ME-llennium. Might have been true once. Not anymore. The idea was around in the mid-’90s, but was anchored in the cultural consciousness by Richard Russo in 1999 in an article in The New York Times called “The ME millennium: How ‘I’ moved heaven and earth.” Russo actually argued there that we were living on the “tag-end” of the Me millennium, but few believed him. The 21st century seemed to be more about ME than the 20th ever had. We used to think differently, having a smaller opinion of ourselves, living as we did with a Psalm 8 mentality, wondering why God even paid attention to us. Then came Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Enlightenment philosophers who told us that God wasn’t paying attention at all. God was suddenly banished from the universe we’d given him credit for creating. And then in the 19th century Walt Whitman extolled the virtues of selfhood in his “Song of Myself.” “I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,” he writes in the opening stanza of this poem, but even he goes on in the next breath to note the connection between “myself” and “you,” when he sings, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Russo gives us the ME generation, but you wonder what happened to the “I” generation, or the culture of I. If there were an “I” generation, I suspect it was the ’60s generation, the boomers who came of age in the ’60s, being children as they were, not of an “I” generation, but of a “We” generation — Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation.” Here’s what I’m getting at. “I” is at least a subjective or nominative case pronoun — first person, to be sure. The “Builder” generation of World War II could arguably be called a “We” generation, “we” being a nominative case pronoun, but plural. There was a depression to ride out and a war to be fought and “we” rode it out and “we” fought it and together “we” prevailed. “I,” or “we,” can also function as the subject of a sentence or a clause; in other words, the “I” must take action, must initiate movement, must get off the duff and do something. It can’t just sit there. This certainly was what the ’60s were about: action! The ’40s were, too. But it was more about the collective or plural “we.” The ’60s were about what the “I” could do, or should do. The question was not, to paraphrase JFK, what my country can do for me, but what I can do for my country. But the ME millennium suggests something different. “Me” is a first person singular objective case pronoun. ME sees itself as an object, not a subject; an entity to be acted upon, not to act. ME doesn’t do a darn thing. ME just sits there. ME expects to be served, not to serve. The action flows toward ME not away from ME. This then is what sociologists and pundits and bloggers have been noting: We live, they say, in a ME culture. It’s not just a ME generation. It’s a ME universe. But, as I said, not anymore. The ME universe is gone. While there used to be a ME millennium, it’s now — clearly — a MY millennium. The culture has shifted — again — from ME to MY. It’s an interesting shift, because whereas ME is an objective case pronoun, MY is a first person singular possessive case pronoun. Not only do the denizens of our culture expect all action to flow toward them, when it does, it is immediately grabbed and possessed. It — whatever “it” is — becomes my or mine, a flight, if you please, back to the preschool sandbox mentality. I should’ve noticed this a long time ago. But it came to my attention recently, when I stared at my yellow Crocs. I’d just read an article about a mother of three in Boulder, Colorado, who had looked at her Crocs and those funny little air holes in them, and thought it would be neat if she could personalize her Crocs, making them, “my Crocs,” unlike anyone else’s. So she designed a little jewelry doohickey, started making a ton of them — she calls them “jibbitz,” selling each one for $2.49. They’re designed to be pushed into those little holes, creating your own unique fashion statement — as if wearing yellow Crocs doesn’t already accomplish the same thing. She then sold her newly formed establishment to the Croc company for a cool $10 million and another $10 million if certain projections are achieved. At that point, of course, the trend toward individualization sort of whacked me on the side of the head. Recently HP and Apple hooked up to create iPod tattoos that one can create right on one’s own computer and printer. HP has developed a specialized paper that lets you wrap a printout around your iPod — the HP Printable Tattoo. Think now for a moment about the ubiquity of the pronoun “my.” A Google search of “my +” turned up 4.9 billion hits in .12 seconds. Chances are you’re sitting at a computer where “My Computer” is a click away. If you are registered at an Internet Web site, no doubt you can access “my account.” But you might also want to visit myway, myfamily, myyahoo, mynews, mypyramid (about food groups), myAol (etc.), mygradebook, mymoney, myhero, mymovies, myhealth, mypay, mytravelguide, mypoints, myworld, mypublisher, and, of course, myspace.com. As leaders, then, of our congregations, we need to understand that — whether we like it or not — people are in a possessing mood right now. We want to be in possession of something. We’re looking for reality — thus “reality” shows. We’re searching for the experiential. We’re not interested in stories about someone else’s spirituality. Mother Teresa bores us. We want something that works for “myLife,” or mySoul. When we can help our people really experience the Risen Christ, really be in possession of a faith-walk that’s real, we might be able to move them retrogressively in a pronoun slide from my to me, to I, to we, to YOU: “You are worthy our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power” (Revelation 4:11).
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