Feelings
of bafflement are not new to me. I spent most of my childhood in a
state of bewilderment, mostly because I was weird, nerdy, and
nearsighted. But the first time I can remember feeling blindsided by
the tides of Culture was in high school, in the mid-70s, when the
fabulous, experimental music I had been hearing since about 1968 gave
way to the Disco Era. WTF? I wondered (or the 70s version of
same). Suddenly a bunch of lunk-headed number-crunchers in the music
industry had decided songs should be x minutes long and you
should play the same 20 songs all day long. Since they were only x
minutes long, that meant you heard them a bazillion times.
I
tried to look on the bright side. I explored an interest in
classical music and resigned myself to the idea that my country was
peopled by don't-rock-the-boat, don't-make-me-think-too-hard folks who
voted Republican 55 to 60 per cent of the time because they believed
those folks would preserve the status quo – and that's the way it
was going to be for the foreseeable future. Civil rights would be
gained slowly (like a glacier inching across Antarctica) and popular
culture would never embrace any kind of depth, beauty, or complexity.
This
suspicion was confirmed by the 80s. The teenagers of the 80s seemed
smugly confident that their president(s) had assumed office solely to
assure them a prosperous future. They were upwardly-bound, the sky
was the limit, and those old hippies of the 60s and 70s were a joke.
Only the punks seemed to question the status quo. I had never felt
so far from the mainstream. I struggled to build a career as a
writer, and was so poor that I often had to borrow money to survive –
this despite the fact that I had begun to work two, sometimes three
jobs to make ends meet. I didn't even bother to ask WTF. I
just kept my head down and kept slogging.
The
last thing I expected, when the 90s rolled around, was another WTF
moment. I opened my eyes and noticed that the teenagers and
20-somethings around me had turned into hippies. They loved poetry
and folk music, their pop music was more imaginative, they were
tree-huggers and vegans. I couldn't figure out where they had come
from. I was working very hard to survive, still trying to make
something of myself. I blamed myself for not succeeding, so I didn't
look at the bigger picture. I told myself that those kids were
hippies because the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction, and
that the next generation would swing back again.
But
it didn't do that after 2000 – not exactly, hence the next WTF.
Older people swung right again, though not by the margins I had seen
in the 70s and 80s. Bush barely squeaked into office in 2000 and
2004, and he was elected by older people. Younger people voted
against him. I began to suspect that something was going on that I
should have been aware of since the 90s. After all, it started in
the 70s, when I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do
with my life. It started when I realized I just didn't have that
many options. I blamed myself for that. This is the thing we tend
to do. This is what drives us to keep working, keep trying. If we
dare to suspect that perhaps we're not being paid fairly, perhaps
we're not imagining that there's a lack of real advancement
opportunities, we scold ourselves and say we just need to work
harder.
Young
people have been hearing that BS for over 30 years now. We teach by
example, and the example we've inadvertently given them is that we're
gluttons for punishment, and we think they should be too. They've
learned to shrug off the dogma we keep throwing at them. And that's
what led to my next WTF moment. My notion that civil rights
would inch along, like that glacier, was shot to hell in 2012. I
found out that the current under-40 crowd has a much finer grasp of
ethics than my peer group did. They support gay rights and women's
rights, they don't see WASP culture as superior, they want to protect
the environment, they think war is pointless and greed is
destructive.
I
hope these young people get out and vote in record numbers from now
on. I hope they give me another happy WTF moment. I hope I
can give them a good example of how to live instead of an example of
what not to tolerate.
I'm
working on it – but this time, I hope, with my eyes open.
Illustrations
by Ernest Hogan, nanohuduista and teoguerrilla. If he ever catches
up with me, I may get an unauthorized infotattoo . . .
