I apologize in advance for the length of this diary. I don't usually have time to write long entries so when I do it kind of bubbles out.
Dear Baby Boomers and all Kossacks over the age of 50,
Hi. It seems we've had a little bit of a generational spat going on the last couple of days.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
While I disagreed with many of the points my elders have been touting, I appreciate the effort they are making to offer their perspective. It seems to me the more progressive end of the Baby Boom generation has been silenced for the past 20 years or so and there can be no harm in their coming back into the limelight now. I, for one, had been led to believe that you didn't exist anymore, that you had all sold your souls for a job and a parking spot at Walmart. I'm glad to know that's not the case.
But since this particular outbreak of voices did not come under the most positive of circumstances, I thought some work needed to be done on the other side of the divide. We know who you are. Now it's time for us to say who we are. And hopefully we can all learn a few things and emerge from this as a more united front.
First, let me tell you about myself. I was born in 1980, the very year Reagan defeated Carter and in many ways, the moment in which the current iteration of our recurring political nightmare began. I refer to myself as a twenty something because I am on the cusp. Some will claim me as an Xer. some will say I'm a generation below. I've heard the arguments several times and I'm not really that interested in who wins. I cannot in any way claim to speak for the entirety of either of these or any group and indeed, some may be offended by what I have to say. But if what I say manages to resonate with a significant number of people, it will likely be because we share a similar background and have experienced modern history in much the same way. Same as it is with you and yours.
I did not have bomb raid drills in school. I was not educated about the evils of the cold war. Where civil rights and long-term peace were in many ways new and challenging ideas in your time, for me they were a starting point. I learned about Martin Luther King in History class the same way I learned about Thomas Jefferson and they were treated in almost the same way. I am white but went to elementary school with Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and even some born in Europe. Integration was not necessary. It was quite a shock for me as a child to learn that integration had even at one time been so controversial.
My mother was a baby boomer who was in middle school at the time of the JFK assassination and my father was silent generation. They were divorced and I lived with my mother but still kept in regular contact with my father. He was a self proclaimed "Robert Kennedy Democrat" and I am sorry to say that he did not hold Baby Boomers in very high regard. Many times as I was growing up, I would hear about how the civil rights movement was started by Silents as an intellectual thing and was then corrupted by hippies who were just looking for a party. I bring this up not because I agree with him but just to show the images I was brought up with. He also loved to point out that Dylan and Jon Lennon were of his generation and not my mother's.
Like most young people of all generations, my friends and I wanted desperately to not end up like our parents. For the baby boomers, that meant protesting against institutional hypocrisies like racism and the draft. For us, it meant something far closer to home: suburbia. I spoke to one self proclaimed dirty hippie yesterday who made the very sobering observation that when they were young they felt like they were being bred to die. I can't possibly know how that felt. I was told something far different. I was told that the best and most noble thing I could do as an American would be to grow up and have a two-story house with a backyard and a four door in the driveway. I was forced to go to church and taught to "just say no." In almost every sense, I was early on offered a black and white view of the world, the world of Reagan
And all around me that world was being undermined. My mother preached family values and yet she was a divorcee. Though she worked hard and gave me everything I needed, it was impossible to reconcile the family values she was preaching, and that were coming off the TV, with the reality of my everyday life. At school I watched the wall come down, the Soviet Union collapse. I did not grow up thinking they were an Evil Empire, but a repressive regime that had hurt their own people. And now the long tragedy was over.
In high school I learned about Vietnam and the counter culture. The heros and events of your time seemed like mythology. They were epic, elevated. I knew a lot of people who longed to be part of such a coherent social movement but saw very little around them worth fighting for. There were no obvious causes, nothing that could rally enough people together - especially in Texas, where I grew up. During the Clinton years, my friends used to joke about how cool it would be to have an enemy so we could live out the kind of youth that we saw on TV and the movies. We wanted to throw bottles and burn draft cards. We wanted something bigger than ourselves to believe in.
But in many ways the very source of that yearning was also what held us back. See, while we all recognized the glory of what you had achieved, we also saw the failures. I saw no remnants of "wild mercury" or the Summer of Love in my parents. When I looked at Bill Clinton, my teenage mind did not see a young man who had marched for civil rights but a slick, gregarious, huckster who, while far better than the Republicans, was really kind of a joke. The same goes for music. The heyday of the Rolling Stones, The Who and many other bands of your period had long passed and now they were bloated and rich, doing huge stadium tours and releasing stale, banal albums.
Thus began an obsession with self reflection and the search for authenticity. I didn’t want to be fake. Like one of my early heroes, Kurt Cobain, I didn’t want to grow up to be a respectable commodity, accepted by the same masses who voted for Newt Gingritch. My friends and I were using the term "sell out" when I was only thirteen. For many of you, that phrase has a political connotation. For us it meant losing your edge, your vitality. We watched good artists change overnight after signing a big corporate contract and we were disgusted. We wanted something real and to some degree, that meant permanent. We wanted to find a road or a lifestyle that would not end in self parody or violent extremism.
And in the end, that meant not ideological purity but rejecting ideology itself. Purity was just hypocrisy, a dead end. Anytime I tried committing to a cause or to some kind of belief system, I would find myself stopping halfway through and looking in the mirror. "Who am I kidding?" In the end, the only thing in the world I could trust as permanent was irony. It was where all things seemed to lead.
In college, I moved to Austin and had my big "cultural awakening." I lived with thirty students in a coop, where I saw all sorts of things that I had never dreamed of in Suburbia. I started listening to punk rock and living the raw life I had always wanted. I read literature, watched Fellini and Bergman movies and discovered art. I also experimented with drugs and discovered that much of what I had been told in the DARE program was a lie.
For us there was no political or philosophical attachment to these things. It was all about the sensory experience. Really there was no attachment to anything. I had friends that challenged all sorts of barriers - sexual, gender, racial, religious and legal. I knew girls who would reject guys on the premise that they were gay and then slept with another girl's boyfriend. Hell, I saw guys do it too. And of course I also had GLBT housemates who were in very real and meaningful relationships. Basically, I learned to be wary of absolutes and labels of all kinds. I wanted to be free of all systems, while still keeping the progressive values of brother hood and empathy. I wanted to see clearly and make choices with maximum creativity and flexibility.
The closest thing to a summation of this philosophy I can find are these lyrics by Conor Oberst, a singer/song writer whose birthday is only a month from mine.
There is no beginning to the story
A bookshelf sinks into the sand
And a language learned and forgot, in turn, is studied once again
It's a shocking bit of footage viewed from a shitty TV screen
You can squint at it through snowy static to make out the meaning
And keep on stretching the antennae, hoping that it will come clear
We need some reception, a higher message, just tell us what to fear Because I don't know what tomorrow brings
It is alive with such possibilities
All I know is I feel better when I sing
Burdens are lifted from me
That's my voice rising
Where it all began to change was with my first political campaign, Nader 2000. See, I was a teenager during the Clinton years and the whole Monica thing had left me very cold. I wanted nothing to do with Democrats and was convinced Gore was a total sell out. He just did not seem to be appealing to my America but to the middle class family values crowd I hated so much. When the election was over, I was fully sold on the whole "two sides of the same coin" meme. I was annoyed with other Nader voters who were suddenly complaining that Bush had won. What did we care? They're both the same right?
Then came 9/11.
If Bill Kristol is right about anything, it's when he says that this was the event that will define my generation. It's my Kennedy assassination. A moment that I will never, ever forget. And I remember the realization that came right afterward: "Oh my god, we're going to go to war." And after watching TV and seeing Bush plants seeds with statements like "Saddam Hussein needs to know that just because we're in Afghanistan doesn't mean he can make a move against Kuwait," I thought "Holy shit. They're going to invade Iraq."
The next year and a half felt like a long pantomime. I went through the motions: I was angry, I screamed, I protested, I marched. My student body became the first in the country to pass a resolution against the war and I was there and spoke in favor. I sat there stupified as Bush and his regime grew more and more absurd by the day. I remembered the stories I had been told as a child about the East German Stazi and my house refused to order pizza delivery (Anyone remember that lovely little propaganda episode?) A restaurant in our neighborhood that had a model of the Eiffel tower in front was vandalized. Bikers would follow us at our rallies with American flags hanging from the back and rev their engines to drown out our protests. It was a very, very surreal time.
I also grew frustrated with the anti-war movement. Everyone seemed more interested self righteous, counter productive posturing than effective protest. I got pissed every time I saw a sign with a pun or a picture of Bush as Hitler. Did I think it was true? Maybe. Did I think it was playing into Republican hands? Hell yes. See I didn’t care about who did what or peace and love or any kind of silly platitudes. I wanted to stop it. I wanted to make my arguments in an honest way, one that could reach people on a subconscious level. I failed. We failed
And when the whole debacle was over, I was determined to get the hell out. I moved to Japan, got a job teaching English. I cut myself off from all American news and culture and learned a lot about the way things work outside of our continent. I came to see all the problems and contradictory impulses of the American way of life, right down to the simple things like apartment size and air conditioning. I didn't even really follow the 2004 elections except to request mail in my absentee ballot for whoever the hell had a "D" in front of their name. John Who? It doesn’t matter. I was never voting non-Dem again.
And after we lost I was done with partisan politics forever. Swore it off. I started listening to a lot of post movement Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I read poetry and post modernism and told myself that art was the only thing worth living for. I was convinced that America was lost forever.
Even when I discovered sites like Daily Kos, I was skeptical. It all seemed too partisan, like everyone was framing their opinions only in opposition to the Republicans and not trying to make arguments that could move the whole country or produce fundamental change. I didn't diary and I sure as hell didn't comment.
But when I saw the Democrats retake control of Congree in 2006, I was impressed and vaguely aware that the Internet had something to do with it. In the meantime, I had got married and started seriously thinking about returning to the US with my wife. Started thinking about having kids. And I read about Barack Obama, whose speech at the 2004 convention I had missed. "What the hell," I thought and found the video on Youtube.
It was like being struck by lightning.
Here was my leader. Here was what I had been waiting for. Someone who framed his arguments in philosophical, rather than political or partisan, terms. Someone who really seemed to get that the fundamental changes needed in America were ones of lifestyle and attitude rather than policy. Someone who understood that the anti-war movement had failed because it was not inclusive enough. Obama inspired me and that’s what led me here, to Kos.
So when Obama talks about these mythical people who reject partisan thinking and overheated rhetoric, he’s talking about me. I’ll raise my hand. I’m the one you should be directing your venom at. But I also think you misunderstand him. Being inclusive doesn’t mean catering to the right to bring in more people. It means not driving people away. It means rejecting the false paradigm of left and right not because we need something in between but because we need something new, something that hasn’t been tried before. It means recognizing the limitations of our old ideas and old associations and trying to move forward.
Some of you feel you have fought a righteous battle and deserved to win. That’s fine. It’s not your values that alienate people, people share those. It’s the way you express them. Think back to the Yippies and the 68 convention. How much more respect and attention would those protesters have gotten had they not done childish things like raise the Vietnamese flag? Was it unpatriotic? Not really. Was it stupid? Yes. And counter-productive. Or what about Move on? How much more respect and attention would they have gotten if they had made a substansive argument Petraeus’ testimony, instead of screaming for attention by beginning their screed with a pun? Come on. It wasn’t wrong or libelous, it was juvenile.
This is what Obama is talking about in his patriotism speech. About letting the arguments speak for themselves and avoiding cheap insults and ad hominem attacks. Yes the Republicans did it first. But that’s also why so many people are moving away from the Republicans now. They’re looking for a place to go. They’re looking at us. Are we going to drive them away with the same kind of overheated nonsense? The same kind of self indulgent circle jerk that, in my opinion anyway, was partly responsible for turning people off to progressives in the first place? Or can we forget about who was right and who was wrong, who was unfairly vilified and who got away and just concentrate on now?
That’s my perspective. That’s where I’m coming from. That’s my challenge. Now you know.
Sincerely,
Last Years Man