Trump: “I hear that very few people are going to be there."
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| Medford, noon Saturday |
Trump: "I looked at all the brand new signs… I guess it was paid for by [George] Soros."
Trump: “The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective, and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.”
It was a lovely October day. I felt a strong sense of déjà vu.
Paul Simon's song, Kodachrome (R), went through my mind. He was stuck in the past. The nice bright colors, the greens of summer, and all the girls he knew when he was single who wouldn't match his sweet imagination. Laura Nyro played in my head: "Gonna wash you up, and wash you down. Gonna lay the devil down, gonna lay that devil down." And then,
Save the people! Save the children! Save the country!
The lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" came to mind. They were "Volunteers of America."
Hey, I'm dancing down the streetGot a revolutionIsn't it amazing all the people I meetGot a revolutionOne generation got oldOne generation got soldThat generation got no destination to hold. . . One generation going aheadOne generation went to bedCome on now, we can do itWe can do anything, yeah
The "we" in that song is young people.
The crowd on the sidewalk Saturday was a wonderful crowd, but I could not fail to see what I saw. The crowd skewed heavily toward people my age. Good people, people with good values. Boomers like me.
Boomers may not like it, but we are likely standing in the way of the change we want. We may need to open our minds to a future that is better for young people and worse for us. This was a crowd that wanted to restore something: democracy. We are conservative, in that sense. We are preservers, not creators. We are resisting bad change.
I suspect a revolution that brings change that benefits young people’s ability to buy homes, get out of debt, and get established as adults will be led by a young person who inspires young people.
4 comments:
Seattle is of course far different than Medford. I am my family gathered at one of the neighborhood protests in West Seattle, so we missed the “mile long” march downtown. It’s hard to estimate but the sidewalks were crammed along all four corners of The Junction (Alaska and California). When the lights turned red we all had 15 seconds to fill and then clear the intersection. And it went one for 2 hours as the crowds grew. There were plenty of gray heads for sure, but many young families with strollers and packs. Nobody seemed angry. Businesses loved it- coffee shops and bakeries had lines out the doors before and during the event. The hand-made signs and costumes were so varied, creative and original- that it lacked the feeling that the message was somehow staged by some slick political marketing firm. People took time and thought to do this and the sense of unity was clear and purposeful around an idea and not a person.
The challenge I see is that there doesn’t seem to be anyone standing in the gap. Yet.
Olympia was also attended with lots of signs and everyone being friendly to each other. Still feel a bit powerless, but at least we showed a willingness towards protecting democracy. More old than young people, but definitely plenty of all ages including lots of dogs.
The next generation got too many obstacles to lead.
My generation gots plenty of time to volunteer.
Look what’s happening on the streets - it bleeds.
And who are we?
We’re the aging hippies of America …
(Repeat)
I was one of the hippies who heard that Jefferson Airplane song back then and thought we were part of a cosmic consciousness revolution. But in the mid 1970s, about 9/10 of my generation suddenly stopped being hippies and started doing cocaine, wearing polyester leisure suits, and dancing to stupid music at discos. We hippies thought we were the revolution, but it turned out that most of us were just trend victims.
Not me, though. I am still a Grateful Deadhead hippie Buddhist. I never went to a disco in my life, and never wanted to. Tried cocaine twice, didn’t like it, and never did it again. Those experiences and a number of others taught me that my naïve youthful utopian idealism was dumb and needed a huge dose of practicality to have any hope of improving things.
We hippies were lucky that our revolution did not succeed, unlike the ones from then that did: the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot in Cambodia. If we had succeeded, the bad karma from that “success” would likely have led to our next 10,000 incarnations being the caterpillars that get paralyzed by wasps and eaten alive from the inside out by wasp larvae.
Now the young people call us Boomers, and they say we are the problem. I won’t be around when they get to be my age and discover that a lot of what they thought when they were young was just plain wrong and that now the even younger people are blaming them for the state of the world.
But what goes around comes around, and they too will someday have their turn in the harsh light of condemnation by the clueless young.
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