Young and old live in different worlds

     "I just wish Joe Biden would go away quietly. I haven't heard a single new idea out of him. I think his wife wants him to come home, too. I want someone young. I know what it's like to get old, and we aren't who we used to be. I support Pete Buttigieg."

       Christy Day of Amherst, New Hampshire, age 70, College class of 1971

Harvard strike poster, 1969

 Fifty years is a far-away world.

Fifty years ago, in college in 1969, I stared at the paintings on the wall of the main research library, saw the image of the happy doughboy--the American soldier in the Great War that had just ended, temporarily--and read these words carved into the wall:

                 They crossed the sea crusaders keen to help 

                 The nations battling in a righteous cause.

                 Happy those who with that glowing faith 

                 In one embrace clasped death or victory."

I remember being stunned at the unspeakable wrong-headedness of the image and sentiment. Righteous cause? Victory? Happy death? What were they thinking?

That war seemed so impossibly remote in time. Artillery pieces pulled by horses. Strange clothes. Suffragettes. And political sensibilities that would have the painter and the president of the university jointly write and inscribe those words, imagining--celebrating!-- Americans going off to a pointless war to die in a colossal blunder.

The modern world of 1969 was entirely different.  No horses pulling artillery pieces. We had put a man on the moon. We had IBM Selectric typewriters. We had great music. We had tie dye. 

Grasping Victory and Death

Most important, we had an utterly different view of politics than in 1919. Whatever memorial might be put up after the Vietnam War, I knew it wouldn't be a celebration of crusaders in a righteous cause with glowing faith clasping victory and death.

Another fifty years have passed.

The era and consciousness of 1969 is still current in the minds of my college classmates, who I am seeing mixed in with observing presidential candidates. We carry the clear memory of the JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King assassinations. And Walter Cronkite. And the nomination of George McGovern and his blowout defeat. The establishment of the EPA ad the Clean Air Act under a Republican president, and then the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.

It isn't baggage to my generation. It is vividly lived experience.

This blog receives a lot of criticism from voters younger than myself, people dismayed at the political inertia put up by the cohort of Baby Boomers. The group most frustrating to them is not the unpersuadable conservatives--they are lost causes. Heck with them. The frustration comes from people like myself who consider themselves to be lifelong liberals, people fighting the good fight over the past decades. To some of my generation, including Larry DiCara in yesterday's post, Biden looks pretty reasonable.

Progressives on the left see  Biden as hopelessly out of date. 

Is it possible that people who are twenty years old now consider the events and the political consciousness of people in 1969 as remote as I felt the consciousness of 1919?  

Not only is it possible, it is inevitable.

Another Baby Boomer, Thad Guyer, who places comments and Guest Posts here frequently, observed about a post written about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that people in power will not give it up gracefully, and should not. They will turn over power to the next generation when that generation--Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke,, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, have the public support necessary to tear it from their clenched fists. Power is seized, not gifted.

Readers have asked me who I support. I support whoever has the power to grasp the leadership. The ability to do it is the validation that they should do it. I hope it is the next generation..I agree with Christy Day in her quote above, that it is time for a generational change, but it will happen when someone excites and inspires Americans, young and old, to pass the torch to the new generation. 

Christy Day

So far it hasn't happened for Kamala and Cory and Beto and Tulsi and Pete. Voters appear to still be supporting Biden, Sanders, and Warren.

And Republicans still support Trump.