“It’s about power,” proclaims The First Evil in the seventh season’s premier episode. By the time the season, and the series along with it, comes to an end, Buffy proclaims to a room full of girls denied such power by long-dead men who were afraid to fight their own battles: “I say my power should be our power.”

And suddenly, the series breaks open its long-standing metaphor, of Buffy representing any girl or woman working her way to her own particular power, and shows the point of it all more blatantly and unapologetically than it ever had before.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer always was about one character saying to girls and women in her audience, “My power is your power.” Fitting, then, that in the end the series found a way, within its own mythology, to dramatize for us what that meant. To make her power their power.

2005: My Generation is Going Gold
by Silvio Laccetti
Professor of Humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ

We are the smallest generation. Once called the silent generation, we are the pivotal generation of the last 60 years. We are the Rock’ n Roll Generation, born from 1940 through 1945. My generation. This New Year, 2005, the first of our number arrives at the golden age of 65.

Sandwiched between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, we occupy our own high place in America’s social history. We have served as foundation builders in key areas of American life, and we have cemented the social structure of the last 35 years. Our generation is recognized by many names.

Of course, as the Rock ‘n Roll Generation, we discovered and popularized the music that radically changed popular culture. In the early 50s, proto-rock ‘n rollers found the moondog music of black artists on obscure R&B stations. “Rock” became a cultural attitude, infusing the arts, theatre and even politics. We were the first modern generation of rebels, albeit rebels without a cause. We said rock and roll would never die and, for better or worse, it hasn’t.

Clearly, my generation is also the Atomic Generation, closely identified with the 1950s and their epochal changes. Domestic joy and tranquility contrasted with apocalyptic visions of annihilation.

On November 1, 1952, the U.S. exploded the first H bomb. Soon afterwards, fantasies of total destruction were regularly projected in film and slide shows in school auditoriums throughout the land. I can still remember the fear that gripped us while watching endless replays of that nuclear detonation. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!

Luckily our trusted teachers taught us what to do. We learned to duck!

The Atomic Age was the most fearful aspect of a more generalized pathology — continuous, unpredictable Cold War. Brutal, atheistic communists ravaged our generation’s reality. To combat this threat, most institutions, including Hollywood and even the government, itself turned to the only help left- God.

The first Cold War Generation learned more about religion through popular culture than they did by any other means. GOD was inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. Biblical themed epics bounded at the movie shows and nobody objected. The last significant one of this genre- for us- was titled The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Everyone seemed to know He had the whole world in His hands.

As we matured into adolescence we became the Space Age Generation. When the Soviet Union beat us in the space race with their launch of Sputnik in 1957, we were to be the vanguard protectors of the free world. We began preparing for careers in astronomy, physics and rocket science (Science!) math and, of course, engineering. Excitement and challenge were in the air.

We reached for the moon and we helped the nation to get there. We seemed to be reaching for God, climbing a stairway to heaven. But down that stairway had come the Roswell aliens, and others from the dark side of the moon were on their way.

To be sure, not all our generational foundations were unsettling. We were the TV Generation, enjoying a pleasant life in black and white. We were learning to live vicariously as most people do now through technology.

In one special institution (for boys only at first) we lived actively and vicariously as well. We were the founding generation of Little League. Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.

Because we passed through so many mini-revolutions we were also the cement that binds much of our society together. We went from the 78 rpm record to the DVD recorder disc, from the typewriter to the Palm pilot.

Passing through these developments makes my generation a source of wisdom which is a valuable social cohesive never to be overlooked by younger people. We have been and are that proverbial bridge over troubled waters.

My generation was gut-wrenched into maturity in November, 1963 during the long days of national mourning for President Kennedy. Mature, melancholy and morose, our momentum as generational leaders of change quickly ebbed. Our place was taken by Baby Boomers all too ready and too eager to begin their work.

If 1963 was a year of innocence lost, 1965 was the pivotal year for America and our last year as “leaders of the new generation”. In truth, we were ready to abdicate. The face and course of America was to change forever in that fateful year.

A short list of events in that single year includes: the great escalation to war in Viet Nam; the shocking urban riots in Watts; a renewed but combative Civil Rights movement; Urban Renewal; the new Immigration Act. Out with the old, in with the new!

In New York City, the last great World’s Fair closed its gates and in November, the lights went out in the city. My generation was not the one that turned them on again.

Forty years later, it’s 2005 and most of us are staying alive (oops). Thanks to new attitudes toward seniors and second careers, and with continued help from medical advances we remain an undeniable part of America’s future. As veterans of four decades of change in which America became the sole world super power we still have much to contribute. We will not fade away.

Good Week For Outsourcing, after a Chinese man advertised for a woman to serve as a stand-in for his mistress, so his angry wife could beat her up. He offered 3,000 yuan ($400) for 10 minutes of being pummeled. Ten women have applied.

Bad Week For Rural humor, after a Maryland legislator proposed a ban on “bumper nuts,” outsize plastic testicles that wry pickup-truck owners have taken to affixing to their trailer hitches. “It’s a pretty serious problem,” said Delegate LeRoy Myers Jr. “You have body parts hanging from the hitches of cars. We’ve crossed a line.”

America isn’t the only place where science is under siege, said Nicolien den Boer in Amsterdam’s Radionetherlands.nl. Muslim creationists are waging a stealth campaign to try to make Europeans doubt the truth of evolution. They have blitzed European schools with copies of an 800-page Islamic textbook called The Atlas of Creation. The Turkish author, Harun Yahya, holds that Darwin’s theory “is responsible for all the evil in the world, including international terrorism.”

NATO member Latvia said this week it would pull most of its troops out of Iraq by the summer, to free up forces for the fight in Afghanistan. Baltic neighbor and fellow NATO member Lithuania quickly followed suit. Latvia currently has 125 soldiers in Iraq and 36 in Afghanistan; Lithuania has 53 in Iraq and 120 in Afghanistan. Three Latvian soldiers have died in Iraq since joining the coalition forces in May 2003.

There are prophecies and oracles from around the world that all seem to point to December 21, 2012 as doomsday. The ancient Mayan Calendar, the medieval predictions of Merlin, the Book of Revelation and the Chinese oracle of the I Ching all point to this specific date as the end of civilization. A new technology called “The Web-Bot Project” makes massive scans of the internet as a means of forecasting the future… and has turned up the same dreaded date: 2012. Skeptics point to a long history of “Failed Doomsdays”, but many oracles of doom throughout history have a disturbingly accurate track record. As the year 2012 ticks ever closer we’ll speculate if there are any reasons to believe these doomsayers.

For its temporary embassy in Washington, D.C., the Iraqi government purchased a $5.8-million Tudor-style mansion across the street from the home of Dick Cheney on Massachusetts Avenue. The mansion features a built-in espresso machine, heated floors, soft pistachio carpeting, and a Jacuzzi.

Ted Wells, Scooter Libby’s defense lawyer, gave his closing argument. “He’s been under my protection for the last month,” Wells told the jurors, “now I’m entrusting him to you.” Then, he sobbed, “Give him back! Give him back to me!” Wells then went back to his chair and sniffled. It was discovered that Abdul Tawala Ibn Alishtari, an indicted terrorist financier, gave more than $15,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We need to be careful,” said the NRCC in a statement, “not to rush to judgment.”

Scientists said “quasicrystalline” designs in medieval Iranian architecture indicated that Islamic scholars had made a mathematical breakthrough that Western scholars achieved only decades ago and concluded that ancient Iranian culture was very, very smart.

Twelve senior citizens on a beach excursion in Costa Rica during their Carnival Cruise Line vacations drove off two muggers, while a 70-year-old American put a third in a headlock, broke his clavicle, and strangled him to death.

With its new slogan “The Light is On for You,” The Archdiocese of Washington launched a marketing blitz that included ads on buses and subway cars, 100,000 brochures, and a highway billboard in an effort to get Catholics to confess.

After widespread opposition from residents of Utah and Nevada, the Pentagon canceled its plan to test a large non-nuclear bomb as part of Operation Divine Strake.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University confirmed that mothers suffering from heartburn are likely to give birth to hairy newborns.

Scientists in Senegal watched chimpanzees fashion spears from sticks and use their weapons to stab sleeping bush babies.

Thousands of spectators at the Rose Monday parade in Mainz, Germany, watched a float of President Bush being spanked by the Statue of Liberty.

James Cameron’s “The Lost Tomb of Christ,” which the Discovery Channel will run on March 4, argues that 10 ancient ossuaries — small caskets used to store bones — discovered in a suburb of Jerusalem in 1980 may have contained the bones of Jesus, according to a press release issued by the Discovery Channel.

John F. Sullivan was a polygraph examiner with the CIA for thirty-one years, during which time he conducted more tests than anyone in the history of the CIA’s program. The lie detectors act as the Agency’s gatekeepers, preventing foreign agents, unsuitable applicants, and employees guilty of misconduct from penetrating or harming the Agency. Here Sullivan describes his methods, emphasizing the importance of psychology and the examiners’ skills in a successful polygraph program. Sullivan acknowledges that using the polygraph effectively is an art as much as a science, yet he convincingly argues that it remains a highly reliable screening device, more successful and less costly than the other primary method, background investigation. In the thousands of tests that Sullivan conducted, he discovered double agents, applicants with criminal backgrounds, and employee misconduct, including compromising affairs and the mishandling of classified information.

The entire book is a gem. While I do not relish factual and temperate evidence that our clandestine operations in Viet-Nam were largely a sham; that we were the useful idiots to local authorities using us as a cash cow and tool of vengeance on their personal enemies; that most of our officers were drunk or adulturous or incompetent or all three at once; that our top agent really did not have the access he claimed to have but was simply a high-quality channel for his uncle to sell information collected from various local and mostly open sources–all this is depressing. It is also instructive.