Forgiving the Hippies

In the past I’ve taken issue with the Baby Boomers for a number of reasons: for giving up after Vietnam, for falling for Reaganism, for Kenny G. Lately, though, I find myself having more empathy for the Selfish Generation. For all the mistakes they made in adulthood, they gave a lot in college. They tried to end a war, and they tried a lot harder than anybody is now (there’s no modern equivalent of he Weather Underground, after all). They fought for ideals without really having a plan to implement them; they introduced new concepts into the American political scene, and for that I’m grateful.

I’m often mad that they quit their fight after the closure of the Vietnam War, when they could have kept going and diverted all that attention to completely new projects. But on days when I’m in an especially bad mood (like today), I think that if this war were to end tomorrow, I might give up too. I might be able to put the whole scene behind me and say “Fuck it! The real action is in movies anyway.” There’s a billion other things to do in life that are more fun, interesting, meaningful, and altogether better for the soul than stupid fucking politics.

But the sad fact is that this war won’t end tomorrow. It won’t end a year from tomorrow, and it probably won’t end four years from tomorrow, either. And even if it does, it doesn’t change the fact that there are a lot of serious issues in America that aren’t getting addressed, that haven’t been addressed for years and that won’t get addressed if people like me sit on our asses and wait for Grand Theft Auto: The Movie to come to the local multiplex. It’s not just universal healthcare or solving poverty; it’s fixing root problems. I would love to say that as a nation we’ve all learned from the last 7 years, that our shared hard times have bred deep communal wisdom. “At least we’ll never do that again!” is a phrase I would love to utter with sincerity. But I can’t. I can’t because Romney won in Michigan. I can’t because Hillary is the front-runner. I can’t because NBC gets to openly break the law without consequence, and because the telecoms are being granted immunity as I type this. I can’t because there is no meaningful assurance that President Clinton or Obama or McCain will be any more law-biding than you-know-who, or that anyone will take them to task for it.

Do we really think that this next election will solve anything? Can Obama’s “hope” undo the damage we’ve wrought across the world? Can it make the CIA stop killing people? Will McCain’s “stand” against torture give power back to the stripped judiciary? Will Hillary’s promise to respect the Constitution actually culminate in a law-biding presidency? Why the fuck should it? The only promise being made is this: these candidates promise to look like assholes in two years, to totally dick us over and make us say, “Why the FUCK did I vote for you?!”, to shatter our hopes and make us realize that yes, we are living at the bottom of a hopelessly tall totem pole, and our lives are determined by someone whose mind was long ago swayed by power and its green blood. In exchange, we promise to give them that power and - if they say the right things in 4 years, the things that make us feel like maybe we’re at the middle of that totem pole, and that maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to the top soon - we’ll vote for them again. Sure, you’re just a mild-mannered corn grower in odd-numbered years, but when that last digit is even, you’re a goddamn presidential adviser.

I can’t blame the Hippies for failing to prevent this war, because I know that in 20 years, if President X wants to start another one, there will be nothing I can do to stop it. Gore Vidal is right; democracy was destroyed in Hiroshima.

So go ahead, USA. Bring on the war. Bring on the biometrics, the privatization, the complete lack of oversight by anyone with a stake in the situation. If you’re not even going to pretend that this is a government by the people, then the people are going to stop pretending that this is a government. Scratch that. I’m going to stop caring about your government. I am going to cease to live by your laws, laws that I have no say in creating, laws that apparently don’t apply to you, the upper echelons of a society so stratified you can’t even see the bottom. Fuck you and that self-serving rationale you masquerade as logic. “We bombed the village in order to save the village.” Save yourselves next time. It seems to be what you’re good at.

I forgive the boomers. They didn’t do all they could, but even if they had, little would have come of it. Let’s let their failure be our success. Let’s not be afraid to pursue change through means that are outside the box (because really, who defines the borders of that box?). No, let’s take this thing, and let’s do it in a way that let’s our owners know that we are impossibly awake, and that dealing with us is no longer a choice, but a demand. When our ballots have failed, what have we got left?