Everything you see in this country was really hard set in the 60's. We never moved past it in terms of the generation gap and who the "us VS them" of the whole us VS them concept is. That defined most of the roles we've settled into, and we've been stalled ever since. Peaceniks and war hawks, blue collar and the elite, rebels and the establishment. It's how the police became the enemy to a huge demographic of people, it's how the middle class formed their images of minorities and the poor, it's how we learned to define the ruling class and serfs, and got sold on siding with wrong one time and time again.
Most people alive then still think in terms of TV shows from the era when they think about what society looks like. You were part of the freedom loving sex and drug culture, or you were a square. You let your freak flag fly, or you conform. You're a little bit country, or a little bit rock and roll.
The point is, it divided us up and labeled us and put us in boxes, and all the time we spent fighting those labels or finding happiness being defined by them allowed the wealthy and elite to change all the rules of the game. There was a whole generation of young people fighting the power. They were protesting, they were pushing boundaries, they were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. They were the passionate youth, the younger generation that wasn't afraid, that didn't care about the rule book, or the way it should be. They wanted the world, and they wanted it now.
Then something happened. The boomers everyone hates so much today were once the millennials of their time, but they got old. They got frightened. They got tired of fighting. One day, they woke up and looked in the mirror, and they no longer fit the role of radical, they looked like their parents. So they effortlessly slid into that role, and even though they may have retained some of their ideals, they lost their fire and passion and edge. They lost their will to fight and take risks. Risks were for the young. They convinced themselves that they were smart by playing it safe, by not expecting to change the world. They got scared, and they found it easy to adapt and beg for crumbs rather than take risks and try for the things they truly wanted.
So now they are the establishment, but they still convince themselves that they aren't because they have the rednecks and racists and super wealthy to look down on. They have a new enemy, one that was also defined in the 60's. The southern man, with his robes and hood in the back of his closet, full of ignorance and hate and intolerance. They love to mock them and argue with them on social media, to prove that they are still fighting, that they are still rebels. The thing is, you don't change those people by fighting them, you change it by changing the world around them and dragging them along. You change it by making the world better and bringing them along into a better future, where they don't have to punch down to feel like they matter.
We stopped doing all that in earnest in the 60's. We drew up sides, and we've been conforming to them ever since. It doesn't matter what the young and vital people who can actually change the world really want, because we just keep them down enough until they too will reach that age when they are saddled with kids and responsibilities, and are just tired of fighting and find that they are scared of teenagers and their music. Then they will join the other side, and will all feel safer by compromise and acquiescence.
We want young people to be engaged and involved, but only if they do it on our terms. That's not how progress works. That's not how things get better. It's the reason why nothing has changed politically in the last sixty years, and why we've stalled. We are stifling the younger, most vital and idealistic part of society until they are tamed, until they are safe and familiar and agree to do it our way. We are afraid, so we are killing off our best chance to actually achieve the things we once fought for and believed in. We've become the enemy, and we've done it so gradually that we can still convince ourselves that it's not true.
Hunter S Thompson wrote about the dreams and vision those boomers had when they were young, and how it broke and crashed like a wave in the 70's, and then receded back to the ocean. That ocean has been rising ever since, not like a wave with its kinetic and crazy energy, but like the slowly rising sea levels that will wipe us out one day. It has inundated everything, and we are drowning in it, and the older generation is holding the heads of the younger generation underwater, weighing them down and immobilizing them, and telling themselves it's for their own good.
We are afraid. We are paralyzed by it. We are trying to game the system, and tell ourselves it's the smart and safest way to go, but safe never really got us anything.
We have lost our way, and that started in the 60's.
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