December 20, 1985 (I was 41)
What
happened to my generation
The generation waited. It was very easy. It was a time
when it was the generation’s turn to wait. Patience was easy,
mere existence was a recent awareness. Judgments were
made and reserved. First visions are clear. There is no subtlety
to them, no complexity. If something is not right, it’s wrong.
Judgment
leads to conviction. Affirmation by the
precocious multitude creates righteousness,
invokes the courage
to express conviction. Let others call it audacity, we called it
vision.
Let others murmur presumption as long as they moved
aside.
The generation would roll over time, predicting and
planning our own obvious evolution. The ride was inevitable,
it would be prudent to hold on.
The
errors of the past were easily forgiven, those times
were primitive.
We believed any remnant of ignorance would
surely fall before educating logic. Loving parents were not
fools, they were only preoccupied with domestic
triviality. They
always talked of a better life. They had fought each other to
make the world safe for it.
So
it was that the naïve were dismayed by the resistance.
The determined youth were disillusioned by the
tenacity of the
resistors.
The young complacent were sent to fight an invented
war, and the fanatics were killed or sent to
jail. The other
generation was not done yet. Those in power had done what
they needed to get it. They knew selfish greed and would not
relinquish their desires for those to someone
else. Their
advantage, in fact, was their ability to
recognize the other.
They knew what it really was no matter the
idealist tags
attached.
They bought used innocence before and knew it
was a bargain whatever the price. The foolish sellers tried to
hide shrewd smiles. Ironic that something which could not be
bought could never again be owned once it was
sold. After
snickering about what happened to others for
twenty years,
my generation got lost in the commute
traffic. On the way
it thinks about the work it gets paid for
today. On the reverse
trip it thinks about the work it will be paid
for tomorrow. Not
that it likes the work all that much. No work paid for is needed
all that much, that’s why someone must be paid
to do it.
In
the end I suppose attrition seemed so civilized.
Minute changes within the system, quality time
with the kids,
skiing vacations, paid benefits and decent
suits became the
things the generation did while it waited. And while it waits
another generation with nothing to do, cut its
hair because it
looks so radical, rather than cutting our
throats.
