Somewhere out there in the middle of cyberspace, among our microwave culture, a person may come across a home page with a simple slogan written across the top:We don’t mind the term Generation X, but we don’t think corporate-elite baby boomers should be the ones defining it.

Underneath it, glaring back from the jet-black screen, lies a typed copy of the Declaration of Independence. The message being sent here:Members of the so-called X generation are comparing their future with the same types of challenges once faced by the Founding Fathers of this country.

The tyrant king has been replaced with a national deficit growing in thousands of dollars every second, and the dumping of tea as a protest has been replaced with millions of kids opposing world affairs on the Internet. Many people agree that the information age has changed how people view the world, and in a society where cooking something for longer than five minutes can cause a person to become impatient, kids with the X mark don’t have the time to worry about problems.

The one thing people seem to disagree on, however, is whether or not this so-called group exists, and if so, what is it that sets them apart from everyone else?

It all comes down to labels, one Harvard professor has scribed across the Internet. And the lack of one has led some people to coin the term Generation X, with X representing the unknown as well as meaning the lack of anything definable.

The strange thing is, no one seems to know where this label came from and how it was allowed to trickle down through the system and scar their children.

According to many definitions, Gen. X applies to anyone born between the years 1961 and 1981, and represents a group of people who, for the first time, will have less to work with when it comes to world affairs than the generation before them.

In an article written by Patrick McNamara for Commonwealth magazine, McNamara criticizes how society has been plagued with bytes of information to where media have created a world in which people are only trained to take in information at a moments notice.

He also criticizes how political correctness causes everyone to watch what they say, and students have become so discontented with the world that it no longer seems to matter what they do.

Because of the instant society’ forming around us all, the generations who will take control will believe that all of the problems and situations that arise will be solved within moments, McNamara said. TV sound bites, students come to realize, are indeed impoverished ways of understanding complex matters that will continue to impact their lives.

McNamara says that a common use of the word slacker and anti-work ethics attributed to the children of Gen. X, is because living in an instantaneous world has caused children’s attention to drop when compared to others.

Olivia Lopez, in a project conducted at Berkeley, left one message on her home page for everyone to read.

The youth of today do not seem prepared to take what is given to them as absolute lifestyles, Lopez said. Rather, they want to play an active role in creating their own ways of life.

Lopez says that people have begun to confuse discontent with desire and how the tools to make many peoples’ desires come true have dwindled.

The world of today, according to many people on the Internet, has nothing to offer.

Everyone is pushing a person to carry their education further, but the funds, and lack of hope of finding a job, has caused people to give up that idea.

It makes no sense to get as much of an education as possible, and then turn around and not have any chance of finding a job, a person going by the name Gen. Xer, said on the net.

Gen. Xer left message upon message on the Net about his discontent with the world as people know it and how the Beavis and Butt-Head, drive through window, sit-com world has left people with nothing.

No one wants to do anything anymore because they are afraid, he said. People have no desire anymore because there is nothing left to hope for.

It is ironic how the economy had never been better in the 1980’s, but the Cold War caused many people to look forward to a Nuclear Winter.

Now, when the Cold War has been destroyed, and people should have some kind of hope for the future, the economy, and the lack of any attainable dream, has left people with a sense of hopelessness.

The Brady Bunch was one of the more popular shows to come out of the 70s, and that was because it was displaying a tight family in a time when divorce was at an all-time high.

Today, according to entertainment poles, Friends is one of the top television shows.

Friends does for the 90s what The Brady Bunch did for the 70s by offering the youth a security blanket to cling to. Friends shows a group of Gen. Xers with a tight relationship among themselves, some with jobs and some without, but all having fun and sprouting snappy wit to cover up an underlying fear of the future.

Douglas Coupland wrote a book in 1991 called Generation X Tales For An Accelerated Culture. It chronicles the life of a group of self-defined Xers through a series of short stories in which the subjects try to find their place in the world when there doesn’t seem to be any spaces left.

Coupland himself, in an interview with Alexander Laurence, told how cultural fallout has changed how people perceive their surroundings and how that applies to his book.

He said that some of the people getting out of college are facing decisions their parents never had to worry about. It used to be that a person who was 25 would be expected to have a full-time job, not to mention a family.

Today, Coupland said, people are expected to go farther but with less. A person out of college is suddenly faced with a life without any type of structure and are thrown into a world that almost doesn’t want them.

Coupland agrees that Generation X does exist, but he says it is a group that simply consists of people who are not accepted in any other group.

Back on the Internet, trying to find something to explain the myth people have about the problems the world seems to be facing and the kids who need to face them, the screen stops on a small message on some God forsaken Web page.

On it, as a message of hope written to all that find it, is scrawled:History teaches us about our past mistakes with the hopes that we avoid them in the future. But perhaps one of the underlying aspects of the human mind is to forget its problems so the pain associated with it can be forgotten as well.

Time heals all wounds, but it also has a way of making people forget what is important.

In the time it takes to read this sentence, thousands of people will die, and an entirely new generation will be born. Should those children be judged and compared to who came before them and in what order?

People do not ask to be born, and to label them because it only holds them back.

In the next few decades, this world will face changes the likes of which no other generations has experienced. Generation X will be the one history defines as the stepping stone into the next millennium.

In the end, Generation X will make the difference.