uh....wtf boomers?

I'm hearing voices. On TikTok, on FB, on the news. In my head.

 

Voices that sound an awful lot like the voices I heard from my fellow young folks back in the late 60's, early 70's. 

 

Back then we said "We know the answer!"  We were so sure. Love would conquer hate.

 

And now the voices I'm hearing are saying this:

 

"You knew the answer," they say, and it hurts my heart when I hear this, "You knew the answer, why the fuck didn't you make it happen?"

 

And they are kind enough not to say it in so many words, but that's what they are saying.

 

We had the chance but we let it slip through our fingers. It got to be too hard. Too many other things got in the way.

 

It's no excuse that there was an active campaign by the establishment to undermine us. They undermined us with drugs by making drugs easy to access and illegal. They undermined us by linking the Civil Rights movement with rises in crime.  By shooting us dead when we protested. 


They undermined us by appearing to cater to our demands with hollow, meaningless, symbolic gestures. By creating crisis after crisis and using each to chip away at the rights and the dignity of the people. By painting false pictures of stoned-out 'hippies' who advocated communism, free sex and drugs and crime, and then using those images to frighten regular decent people. Then, as now, they used exaggerated media coverage to make some relatively small, isolated incidents to look much larger and more frightening than they really were. To make regular, working class people fearful of ALL the changes we thought love would bring, to paraphrase Jackson Browne.

 

Really, we let it happen. We let our dreams slip away. We gave up those ideas of a society where everyone could actually 'dig' each other, even if they couldn't agree on specifics. We actually thought that was possible, for a time. Those hollow, meaningless, symbolic gestures? We accepted those as enough. As better than nothing.

 

Truth is they were worse than nothing, because the damage to democracy kept happening, right under our noses, and we let it happen. We believed the lies and let it happen. We swallowed the establishment pill and let it happen. Because by that time we had families, we had jobs, we had houses and mortgages and car loans and 401ks and we were just trying to feed the kids and pay the rent and blow off steam on a Friday night because…..

 

Because wtf else could we do?  We had given up by the time Ronald Reagan got elected.  We got Saturday Night Fever. We even had TV shows about conservative teenagers and their 'hippie dippy' parents.

 

They laughed at us.

 

So now, finally, there's a whole new generation of young folks who are just as outraged about the injustices as we were. These are our allies now, and their parents who for sure by now have realized the error of their ways are our allies as well.

 

So let's be THEIR allies.  Let's let them lead. Maybe they can do a better job than we did.

 

Bernie Sanders hands off to AOC, who passes to Harris, who makes the 3 pointer with air to spare. Biden, as team captain, smiles and applauds.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Have the bullies won?

I am so disheartened today.   I just watched a video made by a Pennsylvania state legislator, a Democrat, who'd just found out that the Republican leadership had been calling committee meetings for weeks, forcing the legislators and their support staff to come in close contact with a person who had tested positive for Covid-19. And the Republican leadership had KNOWN the man was positive and THEY HADN'T TOLD THE DEMOCRATIC MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE!   This is criminal.   Plain and simple.   It's also a bullying tactic. Force the other person into a dangerous situation.   Bullies run this country. Bullies run the congress and the courts. There's a bully in the White House and the people he has surrounded himself with are also bullies.   Bullies own the Corporations. This is somehow an admirable trait when making a success in business. Fine. Until they decide to do something that is dangerous to the general population, or even dangerous to a sm...
Read more

They have all the guns.....

Last night I was telling Grace my fears that some of these Governors might feel the need to call out the National Guard to deal with these protesters.  I was heading to my concern that with Trump backing the protesters, this could lead to civil war, but she interrupted me before I got there. I'm paraphrasing here: "Who do the Guard report to?" she said, "Is it Trump?" "No," I said, "They are essentially a state militia. They report to the Governor." "Oh," she said. I went on to say one of my concerns was that someone high up would decide that Trump had to be removed by force.... "Who does the military report to?" she said. "Well, technically Trump's the Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces...." "So they would be on his side." she said. "Technically, yes, but what I'm talking about would have to involve people in Congress as well. Would have to be people from both Republi...
Read more

The Least Uncomfortable Position

Was thinking about plane travel. Long plane travel, when you're stuck in an airplane full of people, perhaps in a middle seat, for like 20+ hours. For me, this is horrendous. The noise, the crowd, the limited space for movement… it is just this side of physical torture. In order to survive that and not have panic attacks, I have to shut down large parts of my brain. I have to find the least uncomfortable position.  Because there is no comfortable position. None.  All positions are uncomfortable. The entire ordeal from walking into the airport to walking out at the destination is one long uncomfortable position.   So I shut down major portions of my consciousness. Develop tunnel vision. Lock away all feelings that aren't physical, and do my best to dampen those as well. That's the least uncomfortable position, soul-wise. And then I work to find the least uncomfortable physical position as well.   I do not think about how much I want to get out of that plane....
Read more