Why this Blog?

I used to be considered a 'millennial'. We were the generation after X, unimaginatively dubbed Y for a few years, but generally known by what was considered the defining experience of our 'formative years': the turn of the millennium. Not a bad generation to be born into. We heralded change, progress, possibly destruction and digital collapse, but more likely the expansion of the global community and the development of new technological frontiers. We were the future.

20+ months later, the world changed. The millennium was forgotten. And I was suddenly redefined as Generation 9/11.

I was in high school in New York in September of 2001, 90 minutes east of Manhattan. I was sitting in the cafeteria on an average Tuesday morning, probably cutting class, when my best friend stumbled to the table, tongue numb and face streaming with tears. The second plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. In less than four hours, a thick black smoke would blanket the horizon; by evening, it covered the sky. Schools were released early; cell phone bans and campus lock-downs were immediately lifted. All around me desperate students tried to reach parents and family in the city, but the phone lines were down and all bridges off Long Island were closed. For 7.5 million stranded islanders, our worried faces turned west, there was no sunset that night.

And for an untold number of Afghanis and Iraqis, a nightmare was just beginning.

My interest in community- and self-identification did not begin that September, but it has certainly been shaped by the subsequent shift in American ideology. I came of age in a society of ‘evil-doers’, of ominous lurking pronouns and isolating vagaries: ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘those people’, ‘over there’. The rhetoric of the Bush era was an endless case study in the language of dehumanization.

In this cultural landscape of absolutes and extremes, my innate response is to dig into the fabric of shared identity and follow the connecting threads. I am interested in what connects people to themselves. How do the words we use to define ourselves affect our relationships? Our interactions? How do we create and shape the communities that we share? What does it mean to be a [fill in the label here]?

Welcome to Jupiter - the place where I sift and sort and try to figure some of it out. In honor of Jupiter/Jove/Zeus, that most infamous identity-changer, let the explorations begin.