I don't know if the way I feel about movies is special and has driven me to choose the line of work I have, or if everyone feels this way and I'm just kidding myself, but the way I feel after a really great movie is so intense, so soaring, that all I want to do is dive into the streets and yell and dance and BE A PART OF IT ALL. But where? And how?

I want to feel in a way I'm not sure my generation knows how to yet. I'm jealous of some older generations in that way. It might not have been the best of outlooks, but "don't trust anyone over 30" has a unifying ring to it.

I want to be moved by people my own age, acting now, right now. John Mayer put it best to say we're the generation "waiting on the world to change." We're so inundated, so overwhelmed with the world's deep, painful, complex, terrifying problems that have been so unceremoniously dumped in our laps that we shut down. We sit, and we wait.

We've been told all our lives, from before we even knew what it meant, that Social Security will be all dried up by the time we need it. We've been told what to say and not to say, what's offensive and what we don't talk about, regardless of whether or not we had anything to do with it. We were the ones who were first shipped off to the dual wars after 9/11, the first college graduates to be dropped off and left with crippling debt in the middle of a halted economy.

But Brittany, you might say, countless other generations have come up against similar or worse circumstances and risen above it! Why are you so special? Because our generation sees all this, feels all this, is hurt and beat down and crushed, and does nothing. We're the generation of Things That Happen To Us.

Because we sit, and wait, and watch the polls. We watch the news. We watch Jon Stewart. We don't march, we don't protest, we don't run for office, we don't report, we don't have salons, we don't talk, we don't do. There are no verbs anymore.

And maybe we're just late bloomers, maybe the dot com bubble made us soft and doughy and the feel-good 90s made us feel too good to get up. Yet. There was a verb six months ago, VOTE, and we did that. We sang and we danced, and we traveled from hundreds and thousands of miles to come together. And then we sat back down. Our good deed for the age, for our place in history, was done.

We're letting all our freedoms and liberties hard fought and won for us, all the technology and communication invented for us and handed to us to use, all the immediacy and overwhelming nature of our ever-shrinking world lull us into a false sense of immobility.

And I know I'm just ranting on the internet, tweeting out into nothingness, and I don't know what to do either. I'm a flaming hypocrite who has no ideas as to how to fix our failing world. But I just want to be a part of something, anything, a youth movement that shows we agree on more than Disney movies. Something that proves we are passionate and knowledgeable about more than Old-School Nickelodeon.

So we, too, can look back in thirty years and say, "Yeah, we did that. Now what are you guys going to do to make it even better?"

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