Keep the dream alive. There’s something each of us can do to help. Everything we do matters, no matter how small.
Those who dismiss these moments because of their flaws need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them and what real changes have, historically, emerged because of them, even if not always directly or in the most obvious or recognizable ways. Change is rarely as simple as dominos. Sometimes, it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly turn out to be flowers that emerge from plants with deep roots in the past or sometimes from long-dormant seeds.
I’m picking up new energy from working with an OFA regional coordinator veteran of the 2008 and 2012 elections. She’s inspired and its highly contagious.
Before he died, Hobsbawm had a few words about the aftermath of 1848’s rebellions that he thought might hold some relevance to the possible aftermath of those we experienced in 2011 (including, of course, Occupy):
He wasn’t a bubbly optimist about the current scene by any stretch, but he certainly saw some possibilities. Just as 1848 would have energized a generation who wanted to change their world, 2011 would undoubtedly done the same. It’ll be a while before we get to see what form that takes, but in the US I would not be surprised if a couple decades hence we are looking at some partial successes that are easily traceable to those Occupy encampments.
One hopes. As the tides ebb and flow, so, it seems, does society and the human condition.
I’m pretty convinced from what I’ve been able to read and what I’ve observed that the millennial generation will really dazzle us once they really get the chance to take over, or at least they really have the potential to dazzle us (if one wants to use more cautious language).
Hopefully they collectively don’t get too discouraged – significant reforms don’t happen overnight, but rather take years and even decades to achieve, and that is with considerable effort and planning. There is often little in the way of immediate gratification, as has been the case as long as one can comb through any semblance of a historical record.
Short-term: in the aftermath of the initial Occupy camps, we have witnessed the reintroduction of class warfare into the American political discourse (the use of 1% vs 99% was a stroke of genius in my opinion, in that it was something easily relatable to people of this era), and an explicit examination of capitalism (which during much of the 1990s and the prior decade had been treated as so much the norm as to not require a name). Some progressive politicians who would have otherwise languished in obscurity are now major players in DC, and are making their presence felt. It’s not a bad start, given the darkness we endured from the 1980s onward.
I’m a war baby, so my coming of age was in the 60s with first civil rights, then the Vietnam War in the forefront. Many of us sighed with great relief at the war’s end and went on to persue more selfish lives. I got caught up in the back-to-the-land movement, set up a homestead in the land of my youth and hung out with the other DFHs in the area. Eventually I was drawn back to politics in the 90s by way of appointment to a township fiscal board. I’ve held one county office after another ever since. Got into state and national activism after the debacle in 2000.
Note to potential homesteaders: It ain’t an easy job.
Was it really so selfish? If millenials were transported back to the living standard of the early Boomers from their childhood through young adulthood, they would feel as if they’d landed in poverty.
They have grown up with too many toys, too many tattoos, and too much food to expect them to be the vanguard of a new egalitarian movement.
Just now seeing this. Maybe. Then again, it is conceivable that there is something different with this bunch – polls showing relatively favorable attitudes toward socialism, or other polls suggesting that a significant number of them question the level of individualism that pervades our culture might be used as evidence that a vanguard of egalitarianism is a possibility.
I also wouldn’t get too hung up on the tattoos, and piercings and such. My parents (who came from the Traditionals generation, aka Silent Generation) thought the mohawks, Doc Martens, and our “toys” to be excessive and were convinced we were the beginning of the end of civilization. My parents’ age group was considered degenerate to their parents and grandparents – that jazz the kids were dancing to was the Devil’s music. And so on. Don’t get me wrong. This new generation will make mistakes. But I would hesitate to discount them based upon their appearance or their toys – if for no reason than I really did not appreciate it back when I was on the receiving end of similar discounting.
And some of us were just DFHs – the great unwashed.
It’s not the symbols of youth rejection of their elders — that has existed since like forever — but the affluence inherent in the symbols that I was pointing out. Tattoos, i-phones, and 500 calorie caramel, whipped cream coffee drinks are expensive. Except for the early baby boomers and those born in the prior few years, the ones more identified with the 1960s (anti-Vietnam War and rejection of the fear and staid conformity of the 1950s – a perfectly rational response to the Great Depression and WWII), the boomers grew up with too much stuff to effect positive collective change. Early boomers experienced just enough material security to see a world that was on the wrong path. To reject the “more stuff” is good mantra. That was quickly snuffed out by the later boomers that wanted the “drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll” of the sixties but not the collective social, political, and economic engagement. They liked consumerism. Mistake corporate driven consumerism for “individualism.”
That hit home! My father told me how his father reviled Jazz and Cab Calloway, deriding it as “Jungle Music” and urging him to listen to Italian Opera. Interestingly, he said that near in time to his own vociferous denunciation of Elvis Presley and never made the connection.
As for myself, on my XM radio I listen to 70’s on 7, 60’s on 6, 50’s on 5, and 80’s on 8, sometimes even 40’s on 4. Everything later than 1990 seems to be not Devil’s music but atonal repetitious garbage. But my grandsons listen to Rap and I’m sure the youngest (19) is drooling over Miley Cyrus.
BTW, I loved Cab Calloway in The Blues Brothers.
For me it was…
“No static at all”
some periods have more good and less crap music. Others have more of the latter. Those periods from the 1920s through 1970s seem to have been easily identified as a decade and generally veered towards the “more good.” Then along came rap and hip hop that just seems to go on and on like being stuck forever on the Disneyland “It’s a Small World” ride but without the charm of the first sixty seconds.
why so dismissive?