I’m a 22-year-old freshman at a small New England liberalarts college. I take classes in subjects like writing and sociology. The school newspaper I write for is filled with aspiring muckrakers, and most people here followed Teddy Kennedy’s re-election bid with enthusiasm. A casual outside observer might say I fit the mold of the left-wing, out-of-touch, spotted-owl-saving, liberal-loving college student. A stereotypical Generation Xer suffering from a short bout of college-induced idealism, right?

Not so fast. I don’t and never have fit such a label. When I was 17, 1 enlisted for a four-year hitch in the U.S. Navy. I entered the service as a young kid–bored, complacent and cloistered. At the end of my completed time in the navy, I was a noncommissioned officer and Desert Storm veteran. My military service was a series of stark contrasts. I often worked for cruel idiots, scrubbed countless toilets and decks, and chipped away acres of paint. I also gazed at the hypnotic grin on the Mona Lisa, visited the birthplace of Mozart, stood inside the Roman Colosseum, climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops and put my hand on the reputed tomb of Jesus Christ.

I’m not bragging. The day I was discharged was one of the happiest of my life. It was also my first Rip Van Winkle experience. I turned on my car radio to begin the long drive home. I realized I was listening to bands I’d never heard of (Who the hell is Pearl Jam? Who or what is Alice in Chains?) I’d grown apart from my age group.

When I got home I told people about serving overseas, about how the pride we felt came of very hard work. My old friends just stared at me and said I sounded like their father. Or their grandfather. Suddenly I felt very, very old. It seemed I now possessed values that contemporaries saw as chauvinistic, archaic or hopelessly traditional. Their reaction was odd, since people in the navy considered me very liberal.

My first mass exposure to Generation X, which was when I hit college, accentuated my confusion. I’d never even heard the term until I got to school. I was surprised to learn that, because of my age, I was considered a member of this lazy, apathetic group of flannel-wearing misfits. At first I laughed. Then the suggestion started to bother me. I denied any complicity. Hey, I’d been away when this inane nomenclature was hatched. “No good,” my fellow students said. “By virtue of your age, you are a part of it. Think about it.”

So I did. But their claims just weren’t true. The more I searched for common ground with my peers, the more I began to notice the habits that set me apart. When I’d tell friends I was in Desert Storm, I kept getting the same reaction. “Wow, what was it like? Were you scared? Wow, I could never have done that.”

Now I’d be curious. Exactly what did that last statement mean? “Well, you know. I mean, it’s not like I’d ever put on some uniform and go to war like in the movies. There’s just no way.”

That response disturbed me. When Desert Storm was going on, everyone I knew expressed total support and sympathy for the American service persons risking their safety to free Kuwait. just a few years later, the idea of serving in such a way seems unthinkable to my generation. I don’t believe it’s because of an abundance of conscientious objectors among them. A true conscientious objector has strong, carefully thought out convictions and acts out of a sense of moral compulsion. I think those who told me they wouldn’t go were just plain lazy.

The average age of an American combat soldier in the Korean War was 20, and in the Vietnam War, it was 19. 1 know there was a draft in effect, but besides the relative few who went to Canada, these young Americans proved that they were doers rather than talkers. Even the ones who went north acted on their beliefs. Today’s youth, by contrast, seem willing to talk about their convictions, but not act on them.

I’ve seen other, more commonplace examples of my peers’ laziness. Physical fitness was expected growing up in my family, and that attitude was reinforced in the navy. Now most of my friends look at me like I’m nuts when I say that I go to the gym regularly Hell, forget the gym. To a lot of my fellow students, just walking a mile to the dining hall is unthinkable. Thank God for that shuttle bus, eh?

Sometimes, just getting out of bed is a problem. Most of the people in my college regard 8 a.m. classes as a fate between death and a world without Quentin Tarantino movies. I’m tempted to tell these people that 6 a.m. was considered “sleeping in” in the navy, but I doubt it would change anything.

Finally, there’s the whole apathy thing. At first I felt certain that the idea of a generation wide sense of total indifference was crazy. It had to be an invention of the mass media. Unfortunately, the media assertions appear to be true. We as a generation have yet to produce any defining traits, except perhaps to show a defeatist belief that we will do worse than our parents.

Not that the situation is completely untenable. No living generation can honestly claim to have a general consensus on any one issue, whether the topic is politics, abortion or healthcare reform. If my age group can agree to resolve its indifference before it’s too late, then maybe we can go ahead to make a more constructive future. It’s time to stop channel surfing and looking for new ways to procrastinate, and to desist from blaming problems on those in authority Perhaps what’s needed is a good swift kick in the rear. Playtime is over, and there is a big bad world out there. It’s waiting to see what we’ve got, but it’s also ours for the taking. Let’s lose the remote and do it.