KEY POINTS:
In a couple of decades, when I'm brandishing my senior gold card between my teeth like a tango rose, I've got this secret suspicion that age 62 will be perfection.
I'm gambling that at 62 you begin to feel something you haven't felt since age 22 - the
ability to see the world with the clarity of black and white. With a little luck, you get back the gift of certainty.
I've hit the Beige Years, that horror-fest age bracket somewhere in between when political black and whites have been washed over with passion-suffocating complexities, now smothered in tasteful khaki tones. My political brain has jellied into a Remuera lounge paint scheme. Drown me now - because I did not sign up for this.
I remember what it meant to be at the Age of Arguing because those are the years that form us, create us, before focus sets in.
Yet today when I swivel my head around to look at the twentysomething generation coming up behind me, the dynamic is strangely skewed. I'm simply not hearing much noise. It's as if my generation has stolen the twentysomethings' God-given political airtime because they're busy texting their outrage like a gigantic cultural mime.
I feel like I'm living in the episode of Kath & Kim that my kids love to quote, when Kim says to her crying baby, "Shut up Epponnee! It's Mummy's turn to whinge!"
That's not how it's supposed to work. The younger generation is supposed to harness their natural political idealism and passion into a loud and clear cry, so the likes of my Beige Brigade has to shut up and listen.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times recently christened this the "Q Generation", as in quiet.
He comments that this generation's activism can't be seen on the streets, it's online. "An online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won't cut it," Friedman bemoans, "Virtual politics is just that - virtual."
Maybe that's just the mainstream media whingeing that young people aren't showing up to their party any more because they have their own rave, the entire internet world.
Kevin Rudd showed up in a Chairman Mao mash-up on YouTube and arguably got more voter mileage out of that appearance than any flattering newspaper piece. Satire is important no matter where it appears, but the real meat of young political conversation is now fragmented into thousands of splintered, less audible blogs.
I'm not here to argue the merits or deficits of new paradigms of protest or even political discourse. My beef is more fundamental. I just can't hear your message because I don't believe this generation has felt compelled to define it.
It's like the beer commercial with Harvey Keitel, where he opens with, "What you say no to always defines you." He walks to the camera in New York's Coney Island, stating authoritatively that New Zealand said no to nuclear power, genetic modification and the idea that only Hollywood can make box office hits.
In 60 seconds, we hear an American actor summarising our identity like a national haiku, written for beer.
Does no one else see a little irony in that? What's more, in the big picture, wouldn't we rather be defined by what we say yes to instead?
This not-yet-hyphenated American Kiwi is asking the next generation of New Zealanders - what are you doing to make your voice be heard?
You're not voting. The number of under 25s in the last parliamentary election who didn't vote was almost twice the number of the general population, according to the Department of Internal Affairs. The same group made up 51 per cent of people who didn't even enrol, reports the Electoral Enrolment Centre.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Politicians aren't going to pay attention to your new voice - because they don't have to.
Maybe today's new activist is now more commonly found wearing suits, busy creating the Triple Bottom Line (people, profits, and planet). Some generations are cyclically destined to be quieter, like the 1950s versus the 1960s.
But perhaps what I am really seeing now is the coming of age of Helen's Kids. No matter what your party politics, Helen Clark has reigned over a nation that has prospered for almost three terms now - maturation for an entire new generation.
As one 28-year-old said to me recently in what was probably one of the most discouraging comments I have heard this year, "There are no real major issues that get my back up".
Is that what I'm sniffing in the air and can't quite accept with much grace?
Has this decade of continued prosperity unwittingly bred the ultimate activism no-no? Contentment.
I can't think of anything more horrifying to wish on any 22-year-old or for us all - an epitaph for an entire generation inscribed in Bambi-coloured complacency.
