GEN X & THE TWO SUNS

When Ralph was little he used to stand on the couch, placing one foot firmly on the arm rest as he tried to replicate the scene in Star Wars: A New Hope when Luke Skywalker gazes at the binary sunset on the planet Tatooine, wondering exactly how his future destiny will unfold, unaware at this stage that he is to become the greatest Jedi Knight of all time.

Staring at this heroic/romantic scene on the GEC 22" television screen, little Ralph felt a mystical spirit summoning him, a cosmic call to arms. The only problem was he didn't know what battle he was fighting yet and so went about the rest of his life doing predictably human things like growing up (debatable), dropping out of university, falling in love multiple times and having a child.

It would be well into his future that his own destiny would be realised and even then it would come as a sort of afterthought which was entirely in keeping with the spirit of Xers, the generation that time forgot or simply misplaced down the back of the couch like the perpetually elusive remote control.

Now it was the year of 2022 and the entire world had gone to shit. It had taken Ralph all of his 44 years on the planet to realise he was actually a Jedi Knight all this while and that now was surely the time to 'Jedi up' and save the planet from complete and utter destruction before the doomsday clock struck midnight.

Between the perpetually "uncool" angry hippy boomers with their utopian dreams turned authoritarian, the whiny, blue-haired millennials and the entitled Gen-Zers with their woke demands and sexually fluid identities that closer resembled the aliens in the Mos Eisley cantina scene in A New Hope, Ralph wondered if in fact the simulation theory of reality wasn't just a merging of the Star Wars universe into the world he'd grown up in.

He'd read about the great anthropologist and writer, Joseph Campbell, in various books and articles and how his most famous work "The Hero's Journey" played an integral part in George Lucas's vision for the Luke Skywalker story.

Ralph could only describe his own interpretation of his hero's journey, this long gestating realisation emerging in his mind to a few of his friends down the pub as like waking up from a dream and trying to remember what exactly it all meant. He still wasn't entirely sure. All he knew was that there had been a confluence of cultural influences from Stars Wars to John Hughes movies to The Goonies that he and many others had derived a spiritual strength from. Slowly he was piecing things together and had come to the grand conclusion that the Xers were the warrior renegades that could save humanity from the Silicon Valley billionaire Sith Lords such as Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos and their transhumanist buddies George Soros and Klaus Schwab.

"We all thought we were irrelevant but who's better placed for the culture wars than us right now? Think about it. We're old enough to remember the pre-internet era and young enough to not get ourselves bullied around online. If Generation X was a Star Wars trilogy we would surely be the original one from A New Hope to Return Of The Jedi."

"The best one, you mean?" Ralph's best friend Fred said earnestly.

"Exactly!"

"Alright then, Luke Skywalker. What's the plan?" enquired Rob, the 'Trekkie' and the least Star Wars-y member of the group amongst them.

"I dunno. I could write a manifesto for our lost generation. We could create a movement."

"I've got work in the morning."

"Me too!"

Dismayed at his friends' lack of excitement about his offering meaning for all of their humdrum lives, Ralph declared that he would go it alone.

"Go where though?"

"The journey. The hero's journey. We've all got one. Some of us just ignore it. That call to adventure that rouses the spirit and quickens the heart."

Sliding his packet of half opened pork scratchings away from Ralph, Rob summarised the situation on his behalf.

"So basically what you're saying is, you're the Jedi equivalent of Don Quixote."

Humbled by his friend's pithy observation, Ralph looked down at his half finished pint and nodded.

"Yeah. Something like that."

Later that night, after putting his daughter to bed and tucking her up with a toy baby Yoda, Ralph wondered if in fact his best chance might be to become less of a Jedi warrior and more of a sage Obi Wan Kenobi type of mentor to his young child and pass the torch of the lightsaber onto her instead.

After all, he was half way through his life now and it was hard to summon the energy to fight against the New World Galactic Empire.

Besides, he too, had work in the morning.