There was Communism, Capitalism, and Schism-ism
Why am I trying to sound so fucking academic when
I’m clearly not one of them birds and am out of my league when I try to pretend?
What I’m
thinking about is mere observation. I’ve witnessed much of it throughout the
years of my generation.
Youth
will always take a stance opposing structures that won’t let them in. And that
goes for almost any kind of orthodoxy. I look at the leadership of the Democratic
party as a great example of this. And it is true to only a slightly lesser degree among
the Republicans.They had four or five candidates under 60. But, sadly, both Parties ended up choosing candidates over seventy years old. The
Democrats offered us a leader from the sixties that protested septuagenarians
running the show when she was a young radical. Youth today are frustrated by
their exclusion and rightly so. However, they have been led by their noses & nipple
rings by a paradigm that would have them all believe they inherited a radical
heritage that isn’t entirely theirs. That they allowed this to happen is proof
that they ceded authority to our generation that apparently brainwashed them
into submission. We would have had more than one or two choices of
candidates in their forties and fifties... even sixties if this were not so.
It’s
a sad commentary that they had no new refreshing ideas to offer other than empty protests like that overly vaunted vacuous media
extravaganza called the Wall Street Occupy Movement. I.e. the chants might as
well have been:
"What do we want?"
"We don’t know, we just don't like you!"
"When do we want it?"
"Now!"
The subtext is that it is a form of micro-aggression to even suggest this or ask what that means.
Nobody wanted to step in to pick up that banner. Who would? The core sensibility was a valid one whose
original aim was to focus on the Wall Street Casinos but the resulting outcome was
that workers were blocked on the bridges from getting to the
source of our paychecks… you know, JOBS… (not Steve Jobs)... we saw it as nothing more than a
bunch of spoiled brats pooping on themselves and causing us to be late to work. Late to work is okay if you're paid the same (as in a salary or have tenure) but the rest of us get paid by the hour. If only the members in the Democratic Party’s politburo would have given
more attention to us... the bread and butter real issues instead of pandering to the fringes, we might not
be looking at Donald Trump’s mug every evening on the Rocky Horror Reality
Show.
One
would have thought we would have organized into a movement more virulent than
proposing an octogenarian candidate as an alternative to represent us by 2016
(feeling the Burn yet?). We came up empty because we had all the sound a
fury of a legitimate movement but less to offer than the Black Lives Matter
Movement and that one only offered an impotent reenactment of the sixties
radical Civil Rights protests with a propensity to sack and pillage each other in the inner-cities.
I
am of the generation that stepped outside the paradigm of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War (and they were young men compared to Hilary and Donald). We had a good run and accomplished a lot. Now, it's way past the time to
step aside but let's not merely pretend to do so by encouraging a younger
version of ourselves. I’m not saying we all should head off to Florida yet but rather
we ought to loosen up the grips on the reins.
Young people came out for Barack
Obama because he was something new and fresh. Like it or not, he was able to
shoot hoops and still make it back to the office the same day. If you are over
50, and can still do that, my hat’s off to you. Try it if you don’t believe me. The younger generation didn't show up for Hilary Clinton and the Russians had little or nothing to do with that. She was old. Doesn't anyone in our generation remember when we couldn't trust anyone over thirty? Or do we want to repeat 2016 in 2020?
