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It's hard to imagine an age group that has so disconnected with the rhythyms of the natural world that surrounds us, that has turned such a blind eye to the truly amazing wonders of the Earth and universe and tries to mask its general ennui and irrelevance in the expressions of trend-setting musical angst and the acquisition of new and marvelous electronic toys.
I was a child of the sixties, born less than a year before the so-called Summer Of Love, when millions of American's young people stood up and said "we believe that this is all about MORE than this." Innocents, each and every one of them. Idealists who thought that a social conscience was a good thing. People that worried about war, and hunger, and poverty, and the rights of the downtrodden.
I came of age in the eighties, a decade already known for its reverence for self-involvement. The beginning of the Reagan era, when youth realized its destiny as producers and consumers in service to a cultural motto of "We Want More."
The music of the eighties celebrated a "live for today" motif. Girls just wanted to have fun, we were encouraged to fight for our right to party, and many of us danced and skated to the wisdom of partying like it was 1999.
But the undercurrent of social awareness was there, struggling to make itself heard above the din of the crowd. We listened to "Crazy Train" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "2 Minutes to Midnight" and some of us even got the message.
But all in all we marched right out and swallowed the build and consume mentality that was being force-fed to us along with our "just say no" public service announcements. Social Conscience? Who had time? We had to earn that paycheck, and buy that new camaro. We needed to inflate our wallets so we could make time with that big-haired, big-titted blonde.
Well, some of us did, anyway. Don't look at me. I was the rebel in the mix. I was on the road a lot, hitchhiking from one end of the west coast to the other, sleeping where I could, working just to make enough to get by until I headed off to the next destination.
I was a Road Scholar, more interested in seeing new faces, hearing new stories, and learning new places. In 1987 I was in San Francisco, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Summer Of Love as just another social reject--a modern beatnik for whom the allure of the forty-hour work-week, maintaining an automobile, and struggling to pay the rent escaped entirely.
I was trying my best to recapture some of the innocence that the generation that proceeded mine had foresaken, but, in the end, it didn't really matter. Eventually I too succumbed to the call of adult responsibility. My childhood lasted a little longer than most, but it too eventually came to an end.
I learned so much. I learned about people, about their fears, their hopes, and their struggles. I learned what it was like to be hungry, to wait outside the closest soup kitchen and hope that they had enough to go around. I laid down in patches of woods beside the freeway, shivering through a cold and lonely night between snatches of sleep.
I've loved and lost and loved again, only to discover, finally, that love is less something you have than something you give.
My life is more comfortable now. I'm a published author who stands a good chance of gaining a real following. But a part of that owes a lot to the risks I took in my early years, when I walked a road I doubt few people would choose to walk today. When I even hint at my experiences with some people, they stare at me as if they think I was insane.
Maybe I was a little insane. But the alternative was to take the truths that were handed to me and swallow them without question. I didn't know how to do that.
While I carry my generation with me, I have never truly felt as if I was PART of my generation. My experiences were so different than most of the people I knew. My best friend, for example, lived at home until he was 25. He worked, partied, and paid his bills, and had the credit rating to buy a house at the age of 32.
Just last week he told me that he'd managed to buy two more. He's the very image of the industrious, hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth, fifty-hour work-week American consumer. It doesn't bother him to be subject to random drug tests. He's quite happy to limit himself to the approved drug of choice for most Americans.
He's always been better at conforming than I was. Then again, so was most of my generation, I think.
Go along to get along.
Right?
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