I haven’t yet read the books by Tom Brokaw about the Greatest Generation, or the Baby Boomers. I have enough of a worldview to know that who they are and what they did. In their own way, they were courageous people who had to stand up against those people who had done wrong. And all the times that I heard people talking about the Civil Rights Movement or the people who fought the Axis Powers, I always thought, damn, man. Ours is not a generation that has done any of that. We don’t do these things. We don’t have Nazis to fight, or civil rights to save.
Certainly, gay marriage is a civil right, as is health care, and the extremists who are responsible for me having to take my shoes off every time I go to the airport need to be stopped, but these aren’t threats to the world. Realistically, these “terrorists,” they’re sad little men that simply want attention and have no means of coping with this world we live in today. They have no frame of reference.
I have followed very carefully, and much to my distraction, the rantings and lunatic ravings of Glenn Beck. At first I was fascinated by this man, this guy that, in spite of facts, truth and evidence to the contrary, would just up and invent falsehoods and spouted them on TV. No one did anything about it. After I was fascinated, I was terrified that he was going to be the undoing of this great experiment. The Constitution and the Framers never ever anticipated a world like this: internet, television, news and opinion 24 hours a day, phones with mail and a universe of knowledge at your fingertips. No one, even in the history of science-fiction, ever thought of today.
And then I wasn’t scared of him anymore. I’m not amused by him, certainly (He’s a dangerous person, strictly because he has too many people believing him. It’s like Bizarro Jesus. I honestly expect one of these days that he’s going to call the President a Pharisee and call for him to be stoned), but I’m not afraid of him. He’s a tragic figure, a sad little boy, who just wants his mommy to hold him. He’s nothing more than a frightened child. Once you realize that, you realize that he’s completely harmless. An uneducated buffoon who reads, but does not understand, a man with no real understanding of the world, who just likes to hear himself talk. A man who fears the government, and has no real reason to, apart from the fact that he should face up to the fact that he let the government get in this deep.
And I got to thinking about the rest of them, these Tea Partiers, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, people who aren’t so much sad, but very very vocal. People who rail against the government, for no real reason. they don’t understand costs, or debts or anything else, really. They just know we’re in a bad place and can’t figure out how we got there. They’re scared and they have every right to be scared.
Then there’s the banks. The hippies and post-hippies who preached individualism, tune in turn on drop out and explode. They opened their minds and found untold treasures beyond their wildest imaginings. Kings among men who currently posess more money than there is any sort of precious metal or gemstone to back up.
And they’re all over 40.
You might say that they worked hard to get there. Or, you might say that after World War II, they discovered that we had completely and utterly untouched resources for the taking. No one had bombed our cities. No one had destroyed out infrastructure. The War was 3000 miles away in both directions and we were perfectly fine. We were able to create a solid economy here, because we still had one to begin with.
That, of course, combined with the mentality of the individual, “just be yourself” generation turned into “Me, Me, Me.” Which turned into the 80s. And now, here we are.
But then I still think of my generation, and how we haven’t a battle to fight, that we’re given this world to live in and we might as well live in it. We are a lost generation, buried under mountains of debt because it’s what our parents did. It’s how you make it. Follow the American Dream.
And then, apart from a wicked few, it occurred to me: my generation might not be the Greatest or the Boomers, or Y or X or ZABFR at all.
When Haiti was hit by that earthquake, I found out that a friend of mine had started a charity to help with education. It’s still running and she was hoping to get down to the devastated country to help in any way she could. The caterers for my wedding are organic, local, free-range, fair trade and every other descriptor of good. My fiancee’s best friend works for AmeriCorps. I’m working to save a classic movie theatre for a town that desperately needs it. This article. Pittsburgh elected a man in his twenties to be the mayor, and Pittsburgh is now one of the great cities of America again. And it’s because of these things that I know what my generation is called now.
We’re the Sesame Street Generation.
We grew up believing that every last person, right down the the grouchiest grumps, are worth saving and befriending. We learned unconditional love. We learned that it’s not about me. It’s about all of us, near and far. We learned that you don’t eat a whole plate of cookies (at least not all the time). We learned that science is cool and that the numbers, ah-ah-ahhhh, the numbers are miraculous. We are Ernie and Bert, We are Grover. We are Gordon and Maria and Mr. Hooper and Bob and Oscar and Snuffy and Big Bird and we are the generation that believes, absolutely and without question, that together we can make something greater than before. We do not stagnate, because to stagnate is to die. We move forward and we pull everyone with us, no matter how weak, or how grumpy. We are full of wonder and cookies and the world is our oyster.
Our war is not fought with guns or bombs or poison gas. Ours was already won with the most dangerous weapon of all:
A puppet.
No comments:
Post a Comment