What Age?

                                             What Age?



     Caught.  That’s how I’ve always thought of my generation.  Caught between the utopian ideals of the hippies and the narcissistic boom-box dreams of the “me” kids.  I am a child of the Seventies.  Even as I say that, I am steeped in sentimental longing for the wild-haired ways of the flower children.
I was born into the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I’ve had a lot on my mind ever since. As I reach 50, so does that week from October, 1962, when the fear mongering maneuvering of power-hungry nations reached a life and death situation.  As I read the day-by-day historical account of events, I am astounded by the resolve President Kennedy showed in the face of opposition from his joint chiefs of the military.  Once they discovered the build-up of nukes by the USSR in Cuba, the military brass wanted to fly an air strike over the little island just a few hundred miles from our shores.  An air strike over a nation in close proximity filled up with nuclear warheads by a formidable world power.  Kennedy would not agree, but we still came minutes from fighter planes flying over and shooting anyway.  Minutes.  (Dobbs,Michael.www.foreignpolicy.com)
     A little over a year later, he was assassinated and conspiracy theories still abound today.  I was only a year old, but those events did remain in the national conscience and did mark my generation. But behind the closed doors of the Cuban Missile Crisis lies the dichotomy so prevalent today among those of my generation, and perhaps between us all.  Whether to show forceful bravado and spew, “War is Peace!”  or to believe in the power of diplomacy, tactical decision-making, and general good will.  The monumental deaths would continue the 60s of my young childhood.  Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.  I don't have specific memories of those events, but am forever imprinted with their long-lasting consequences, and identify with the memories of the martyred.
      The Pulitzer-Prize winning photo, “Flower Power,” of the young man  placing flowers in the barrels of the soldiers’ rifles at the Pentagon during a 1967 Vietnam War protest represents well my childhood iconography. What this image came to symbolize would permeate and create my worldview and perceptions. I was 5 then and not old enough to grasp the meaning of the movement, but it grew and flowered in my generation.  The anti-war song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” by American folk icon Pete Seeger with its lyrics about young love and dead soldiers whose graves their young widows visit and place bouquets upon is etched into my musical memory.  We used to sing that together as a family.  The refrain continues to echo, “When will we ever learn?  When will we ever learn?”
     Twenty years later in a college writing class, I was introduced to the 4 laws of thermodynamics as metaphors for the cultural chaos we were headed for.  Today, it is defined more as entropy, and I see that, as many of my generation do. It’s apparent to us in the falling away of functioning social systems through the dependence on hand-held communicators,  with many users viewing them as life itself--instead of life being where we reside in the immediate moment in our immediate surroundings.  Hence, this little electronic object, which requires extractive fossil fuels to exist and operate, becomes the life, creates the life, and takes the time of the person holding it, and seemingly, holding onto it for dear life.  While many purport that the ability to communicate instantaneously with those far and wide is progress, it seems too often to be to the detriment of deep, sustained engagement with those in our circle—those who actually exist in our physical realm, whose facial expressions, vocal subtleties and reassurances through pats on the shoulder or hugs, we lose, little by little, to this entropy.
     Even I, not of this “smart phone” generation, but as an iPhone owner, forget about the power and simplicity of life without one.  Just yesterday,  I had the wrong information entered in my phone app to get to a place out of town.  We arrived at the wrong location almost late for an important gathering, and I grew agitated as I decided whether to search on my phone for the original invitation or to retype another name in my phone map.  Meanwhile, my riding companion simply got out of the car, asked the people parked in front of us, and got quick directions.  We were only 2 blocks away.  Where have all the flowers gone?  Will we come through this brain drain created by  hundreds of our “friends” chirping their arbitrary Id-ish psychobabble, every hour on the hour, every minute by the minute,  on our little life screens?  Still, we worry and seek the harmony and simplicity that hides now in the recesses of our minds, languishes in faded photographs, rests in  forgotten stories of youth, back when Snoopy did all his communicating with one of the original tweeters.
My generation was shaped by the war protests that occurred when I was a child.  We were wary and distrusting of the military, of the propaganda parading as good intentions falling from the lips of our elected officials.  Those of us who recognized this danger became intent pursuers of the truth.  Became impassioned seekers of the intellect with the ability to discern fact from fable.  Many of us were not pro-military, or did not even believe in a standing army.  Yet, our brothers and cousins, our fathers and uncles were being drafted or joined up, while flags were being burned.  Soldiers were seen, for the first time on national television, in the throes and aftermath of a jungle war.  Moving images of the burning of villages, of innocent women and children bleeding,of flag-draped body bags ,but also stories of  secret agent orange and LSD experiments being carried out on those soldiers--all these formed our vision.  The naked Vietnamese girl running down a smoke-filled  road, screaming in horror as her family and village erupt in flames from a napalm bomb attack is another visual forever trapped in our memory.  This is the TV news of my childhood, with Hunt and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite, in their comforting and steady news voices calmly relaying the events of the day.
      We watched, mesmerized in 1969 as the first men landed on the moon, our parents forgetting for a few moments, the turmoil and unrest. The moon mission I remember most though is Apollo 13, when we waited in agony for news of the astronauts who were lost in space. I embody the yin-yang of those times; rebellious against corrupt officials but with a child-like wonder for exploring the unknown.
Then Kent State happened in ’70, and while I was only 7 going on 8, it was an event that forever shaped my worldview.  I was just a child when untrained and fearful national guardsmen, fueled by the inflammatory words of the governor that compared the student protestors to dangerous vigilantes and commies, shot down college students in broad daylight, killing four. (President's Commission on Campus Unrest.253-4).   But I grew into a teenager and young adult who remembered that.  The songs of the day carried the message.  CSN and Y sang their solemn anthem to innocent youth. Neil Young’s lyrics echoed,  “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming…we’re finally on our own.  This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.”  Peter, Paul and Mary redid Dylan’s, “Blowin’ in the wind and cried out in haunting 3 part harmony, “How many lives will it take till we know that too many people have died?”  The Stones thumped out Gimme Shelter, in the aftermath of  the Altamont killings, the recoil from race riots, and protests, “War, children, it’s just a shot away.  If I don’t get some shelter, I’m gonna fade away…” And the Doors, who evoked the machismo, the mystery, the danger both in Southeast Asia and at home,  spoke with Riders on the Storm,  “There’s a killer on the road.  His brain is squirming like a toad.  Take a long holiday.  Let your children play…” And Hendrix rocked out Dylan’s, All along the Watchtower,  “There must be some way outta here…”
Nixon reneged on his campaign promise to stop the war quickly and escalated it with the invasion of Cambodia before finally ending it in 1975.  I didn’t know all the politics then, I just knew the bloody unjustified war, the protests, and the musical reactions.  It all shaped me. But after Vietnam, the ‘70s blossomed.  Some soldiers had come back and joined hippies and draft-card burners, a curious mix, in protest.  Now they discarded their army greens or wore them as badges of an unusual combination of courage.  The courage to go to war and the courage to protest it.  They grew their hair long.  “Hair, beautiful hair!”  Some of their discarded army greens ended up at Goodwill and the fashion of the day for me and many others was faded military greens, beaded jewelry, wild hair, long skirts and faded Levis.
      Mellow rock and hard rock took us to our soul place.  Fleetwood Mac rolled with Stevie's mystical ways, Welch witch lyrics and that smooth rhythm section.  The Eagles with that day-dreamy California sound. Led Zepplin with those wired, writhing bodies, wailing guitar, and magical lyrics, "And as we wind on down the road, our shadows taller than our souls..."
My generation’s equality fight now was for women.  Feminists like Gloria Steinem rose and demanded equal pay and reproductive rights.  They started Ms. Magazine and made the word “feminist” a reality.  It was not a word or idea to degrade, but a positive vision of strong women with the freedom to choose careers and to receive equal pay.  Helen Reddy’s song, “I am Woman, hear me roar, in numbers to big to ignore,” was reality.  Still, we fight for these equalities, though.  And today we have to re-educate young women about feminism.  Double standards still exist, and strong, out-spoken women still get called names.  But “we have come a long way, baby.”
We were caught in-between the ideals of living off the land, practicing non-violence, sharing, especially naturally grown plants that mellowed you, and throwing off responsibility, filling up the automobile and heading down the highway to find ways to make those dollar bills.  Gas was cheap, freedom abounded, music soared, entertainment was affordable and we had each other, man.  We had grown out of the struggles of those a decade older, some of whom were killed or forever changed by being in the war.  We had made in-roads into the racial equality sought by those of the ‘60s.  We were hanging out with our brothers and our sisters.  We shared our floors and couches, our record albums, our elixir of escape.  We lived the good life—for a little while.
Then the 80s came knocking, and it wasn’t on heaven’s door.  Pink Floyd's darkly metaphorical 1979 album The Wall was made into 1982's starkly metaphorical film, The Wall, symbolizing the chasm as the hard edges of Wall Street crushed the gentle sway of flower children everywhere.  The two world-views we were caught between came crashing down upon us.  The alienation of being "just another brick in the wall" hit us hard.  Out of our teen years and into young adulthood, no longer free to sashay and sway in flannel and patched jeans, unless we were content to keep crashing on someone’s couch, to work in the back of a restaurant or stay in college, for a long time.  And then John Lennon got shot in December of '80.  All the idealism and innocence of our youth was gone in that second.  But most of us survived the cold-hard reality of the busting up of the air traffic controllers unions and then in '89,  the Berlin wall came down. And finally, in the '90s, flannel, long hair, fuzzy guitar, obscure poetic lyrics with double entendres  and ritual rock screaming and wailing (re)appeared.  Hello Grunge. '70s children thank you and the singer-songwriters who revived the campfire acoustic sound, like the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman.
 But in the '80s, mellow minds and wild hair were replaced by uptight coke snorters with short, upright hair-dos, thin black ties, tightly buttoned, collared shirts, shiny black jackets and tighter, shorter skirts.  Welcome to the New Wave.  Good-bye anti-establishment kid, hello corporation slave.  Many of us liked the music.  We still had troubadours like Springsteen and Johnny Cougar( Mellencamp) singing our hearts and carrying our dreams down Thunder Road outside the Tasty Freeze. We identified with the earnest energy of U2 on Sunday, Bloody Sunday. We liked the birth of MTV. We even remember where we were and the first song we “saw.” (Mine was Eddy Money’s, “Two Tickets to Paradise”). We liked songs by The Thompson Twins with their quirky mix of culture, beats and looks, or The English Beat’s infectious, “Melt with You.”  R.E.M hit their zenith and put out never before heard sounds and subtle social commentary in lines like:

“Hang your collar up inside
Hang your dollar on me
Listen to the water still
Listen to the causeway
You are mad and educated
Primitive and wild
Welcome to the occupation”  (“Welcome to the Occupation” from Document).

     While many of my generation have diverged from the songs of our youth and now  have a new variety of favorites-- R.E.M., and especially in these lyrics, captures exactly how we became divided, both by generations and within our own.  Now we were seeking occupations. Some chose liberal arts degrees and the helping professions, or to be artists and food workers. Others pursued the American Dream in the shape of dollars and material accumulations.  I got caught somewhere in-between and tried on all those hats.  We are a teacher and a federal cop with enough to live on, a fine house, a loving family, a nice car, and way too many material possessions.  Isn’t that the American Dream?
     But I am a conscientious flower child from way back, and I think about better alternatives.  I engage in the practice of some of these ideals.  I’ve been growing an organic garden for a long time, have always recycled, enjoy nature over moving pictures and screens any day, promote acceptance and non-judgment of those who are different, usually stay away from inhumanely raised animals as a form of protein, don’t drink bottled water, and so on.  But I also fall prey to hedonism, lazy stretches of time and am fat.  I feel part traitor to my own ideals and part innovator and model for others.  I work within a system that I believe is degrading, disenfranchising, and lying to too many of us. Monitoring our every thought or deed and making us into just a number.  Removing our spontaneity, our creativity, our independent thought; commanding us to measure and quantify, everything.  Mandating us to record all data, to study charts and graphs to measure humanity. Dissatisfaction and disappointment reside in me side by side with resolve and idealism. Still others my age live very different lives with different values from me.
What was it that caused the change from the laid-back, carefree days of the 70s?  Was it just that we got older?  I think it was more.  The economy opened up to new ventures, tax laws went lax on the corporate world, and labor unions were broken, dismantled.  Now the dream of being able to work a blue-collar job, have a good home, and then afford a second one for retirement in warmer climes disappeared.  Unless you had already joined the system, and wedged yourself into the machinery of the venture capitalists.  Then we began to become the haves and have-nots.  Social workers barely able to put food on the table  were graduates of the same high school as corporate bankers, fossil fuel extraction operators, chemical company executives making millions and billions while callously forgetting about the environmental toll, removing themselves from the social consequences.  All of us succumbing to fast food and plastic containers for everything.
Thus, the solidarity of a generation, our commonly held values, were dispersed, dissipated, became divided.  Now organized propagandists from powerful religious organizations join with corporate zillionaires and pollute the airwaves and minds of us all.  The screen has taken over, and it fits in the palm of our hand.  Almost everything is wrapped in plastic and comes from China.  NPR is the last vestige of truth for the common folk.  We can search for non-slanted news online, but we can also turn on the radio and hear uncensored, "clean" news.  We haven't forgotten our history lessons and have seen repeatedly in our lifetimes, the corrupted, convoluted truth-twisting censorship of state sponsored news in fascist regimes.  And those of us who study the truth see it clearly here parading behind false profits, made up men and pretty blonde "news reporters" (ha) on Fox and affiliates.  You Fox lovers, (well you probably aren't reading this anyway) we have studied war; we have learned our history from non-censored sources, and we know you are either blind or willing to be so.  It is a dangerous lack of vision with the potential to ruin us all.
I find even I have resigned myself to the necessity of a well-trained military, and smile fondly and proudly at my students when they come visit me in their military uniforms.  Perhaps even I’ve been a bit  brainwashed since 911 into believing that somehow military force can rid us of this insidious evil.  The problem is, though, that it is insidious.  It lurks in all nations, all colors of skin, all government and religious institutions, all moneymaking enterprises.  It is greed. Greed mixed with lies that preys on subconscious bigotry, blind patriotism and fear of going to hell to gather the forces of the masses and make them march to the tune of the lies, just like in those bad Sci-Fi films.
      So, maybe what I see now is a group of youths with unclear paths to solid jobs that offer good benefits, with no clear-cut enemy, but with a sense that they can be proud and do good work and find a solid occupation, perhaps through the military, or with a corporation, and I can’t fault them for that.  But what about the abundance of complacency, the lack of focus or concern for the plight of our earth, the absolute detachment from the adult world through the absolute attachment to the cyber world.  Should I fault them for that?
What age are we living in now?  For me, it is an age in which I have influence upon the next generations.  I am hitting my zenith.  I live and breathe in this great divided nation.  I think and speak.  I suffer days of dark despair and hopelessness--and light-hearted days of joy and hope.
      On those days, this is what I believe:
A noticeable number of the millennial babes and Generation Xer’s (once called the slackers), are working together with a common vision.  Even as they embrace the digital age, they sense the ironic finiteness of it.  They see through the lies of the Corporate-Religious State.  (Forgive me, those of you who attend religious institutions or work for or run corporations.  I’m not speaking of spiritual or religious beliefs that remind you to be good or do good in this world; I’m talking about corruption of those morals even as they are brazenly flaunted as the way by the corrupted who are destroying this planet and people out of greed and through fear).
     The non-brainwashed Gen Xers and Millennials, they recognize the importance of self-sustaining ecosystems and economies.  They know it’s important to be responsible for yourself and your neighbors when you can.  They know the power of community and shared vision.  They are well-read and have explored cultures beyond their own.  From this exploration and seeking of the truth amid the distortion and cacophony of millions of simultaneous messages of minutiae being fired across the world and into their palms, they know the power of nature, and human kindness.  They seek ingenuity and inclusiveness.  They embody the open-mindedness and desire for equal rights for all  fought for by their parents and grandparents.  They have the opportunity to slow the entropy of this planet and this people.  They do.  Will they?  Unlike the WWII generation, who lived in fear of nuclear destruction, and my generation, who had nuclear fall-out drills at school when they told us to get under our desks,  we live in an age of  ongoing, probably soon to be irreparable, destruction by way of our convenience food, fuel, electricity, and plastic.
     It will take monumental energy, cooperation, brainpower, and money.  Will we ever learn to use it for good?  I am a child of the 70s, entrenched in the idealistic visions and actions of the 60s, and even through the darkness, I do sense the possibility of light.  It is a fractured light, but it is light.  And light begets light.  But will it be enough to create the next age?