I'll admit it. I'm old. Well, almost old - I'll be 50 next year. And as often happens with old conservatives, we tend to crap all over the youth as being privileged and spoiled and arrogant.
Which is true.
But, aside from that, it strikes me that while we may have created a "culture of entitlement" for much of our young people - their entitlements have been tempered with ever-encroaching limitations on their expectations.
Let me explain.
Yesterday, I was transported back to my miss-spent youth by James Curran - who while a staunch Liberal, is also somebody who, I think, "calls 'em as he sees 'em" and who's opinions and thoughts tend to lean towards the sensible as opposed to the strident.
Anyway.
Whether he was feeling the lazy inclinations brought about by the heat of summer, or has lost his immediate will to rail against the injustice of a majority Harper government, this last week he's had one post since July 7, which is no more, and no less than this:
Thursday, July 7, 2011
You're a Gypsy
Which got me thinking.
Firstly, about my lost youth, attending every April Wine concert in Lethbridge for about a decade.
Wearing Howick Star and le Cullotier jeans, platform shoes and clogs, long straight hair past my shoulders, week-ends preoccupied with finding the best and biggest parties, getting drunk and/or stoned to the beejesus, and, with a little luck, topping it off with the company of a young women lacking in judgment when it comes to choosing the quality of who she might join in the back seat of a Camaro.
And - as music sometimes does - it transported me to that time and place, and I was struck by - at least in retrospect, how little I worried about in that world and how much true freedom we really had.
There was no such thing as AIDS.
Even Herpes didn't strike public consciousness until the mid-80's.
The U.S. had just left Vietnam and there were no new wars on the horizon.
As far as lifestyle was concerned, jobs were plentiful, gas was cheap, the concept of our speech needing to be "politically correct" was a theme unknown to most of us. The youth were no longer "rebelling" from their parents - but still were taking advantage of the hang-over of the early 70's, being an abiding belief in the freedom to do what you wanted as long as you didn't hurt someone else.
Impaired driving while technically criminal, was, at most, "frowned upon" in proper society - a prohibition as often as not observed in the breach more often than it's observance.
Who knows - the mid to late 70's may have been the "high water" mark of freedom in the full sense of the word - reminding one of the thoughts of Hunter S. Thompson in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" who pegged his Utopian period as the mid sixties:
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant ...
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket ...booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that ...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda .... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ....
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
I think he was wrong, personally. I think the high-water mark didn't hit until about 1980 - though I did not visit San Francisco in the mid-60's (and being 3 or 4 years old, I was unlikely to appreciate it anyway), I happen to think that the turmoil of Kent State, the morning-after Vietnam was still too recent to allow the youth to really put on rose colored glasses that "everything is possible".
No - that time was 1975 to 1980. I graduated High School with an expectation of infinite possibilities - fearless and headstrong charging blindly into adulthood.. which is the best way to charge out of adolescence, in my opinion.
Now? The war is over. The greed-heads and the special interests are winning now.. our culture, our government, our future is controlled by people who don't really give a damn about the hopes and dreams of an 18 year old boy. Unless he's gay. Or somehow "deserving" of special attention.
Our children are told at the youngest of ages of their limitations, of the "rules" that surround them.. put on a helmet before you get on your big wheel, don't bring peanut butter sandwiches to school - you might kill someone.
Don't dare call somewhat "fat" or "retarded" or "fag", or you'll be sent packing, my friend - because while your parents grew up with "sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you" - that's a time long gone my innocent one. Words are terrible. The kind of slow kid at the end of the block isn't "retarded", or "handicapped" or "disabled", he's "differently-abled". Of course when THAT term begins to identify those who can't do the same things that most people do, there will be a new term children will have to learn to create the impossible illusion that he doesn't have a disability.
Our youth - my children - have been poorly served by the progressive movement of society. They have, in fact, had their freedom stolen from them in exchange for something that is a poor substitute - safety. For a better explanation that I could possible give in a few paragraphs, I would encourage a reading of "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley to really get a flavor of where are youth are going to find themselves in the near future.
On the other hand, those of us who look back fondly at those days when real freedom existed, instead of being bitter and angry that they've now passed by, should consider ourselves blessed and fortunate that we at least got a piece of that time.
And, perhaps, we should have a sliver of empathy for the youth of today who, while in some cases privileged and spoiled, are required to accept their "entitlements" at the cost of being required to exist in a world where freedom, real freedom - is an abstraction that they will never, ever, glimpse during their lifetime.
For those of us in our late 40's?
"We'll go dancing in the dark
Walking through the park and reminiscing."
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