Many in ‘first-quarter storm’ generation lived out ‘carpe diem’

So Oscar Franklin Tan is saying that my generation, the one that bore the brunt of martial law or that called by US demographers as the “baby boomers,” could not relate to John Keating (“The ‘Dead Poets’ grow up,” Opinion, 8/15/14)?

Because we of the activist generation placed more importance in “stability” and in “comfortable, reliable hierarchies”? That we could not make our lives “extraordinary”? That we did not “seek a different perspective on life”?

Excuse me. Didn’t many in that “first-quarter storm” generation actually live out “carpe diem” and so made their lives (and their martyr deaths) extraordinary? Didn’t that generation invent “student power” and make “youth rebellion” a worldwide phenomenon precisely because they did not only seek, but actually held, a different perspective on life? Didn’t we give the world rock ‘n’ roll and then our country, Pinoy rock?

I look at the 1990s children, the generation of Attorney Tan, with all their fascination with gadgetry and, yes, giving the world “selfies” (I’m sorry, Attorney Tan, but we will always see those Ateneo students having a selfie with Imelda Marcos as akin to Jewish students doing the same thing with a descendant of Hitler)—well, it is the generation that I strongly doubt would ever stand on classroom chairs!

—LUIS RUBEN M. GENERAL, esq.,

member, Free Legal Assistance Group,

201 Galleria de San Francisco,

Peñafrancia Ave., Naga City