If youth is no longer to be wasted on the young, then who shall waste the precious substance? And if the answer is nobody, how shall our society survive without youth?
My friends are more likely to have a pile of marketing and ’self help’ books on their shelves than works of discontent or offense. A war protest, or for that matter a protest of any kind, is usually to be seen rolling out the half-alive carcass of a Chomsky or some other prophet of three generations ago, rather than the fiery imaginative young men and woman who used to give such protests meaning. My own music collection is not filled with the soft, commoditized, well-packaged rebellion of my contemporaries, but increasingly, with the fist-in-the-air anger of my parents’ heroes, though they themselves have long ago abandoned that anger.
What’s to be said about a generation so resigned to reality? Have any group of young people ever so willingly accepted that life is a system of profits, without putting up so much as a written complaint? Has any generation so hated itself and so loved greater society? Take for example the modern American School Shooting, a deformed, twisted act to be sure, but one with a seed of resistance at it’s core; even then, the target is not the teachers (authority), but the students (ourselves). We’d rather kill ourselves than ‘just say no’–a sadly ironic term–to compliance. Those of us without the desire to maim or slaughter, seem to be waiting, on the world to change perhaps, but still just waiting.
But what will happen to such a society, a society whose youth is so conformist? Where are the great ideas to come from, the rule-breaking, the innovation? If we all agree that everything is OK, then why change anything? And if we all believe that what little is wrong is unfixable, then why continue to operate the machines and political institutions?
I’m not saying that the rioters and angry miscreants of the past were right, but since when is it young people’s job to be right? They’re supposed to be wrong, we’re supposed to be wrong! Without a long systematic display of serial wrong-ness there’d be no right, at least none worth having.
I fear it may be time for us to burn something. Something big. Something important. And before it’s too late. Perhaps the house of a politician (after he’s left, of course) or the car of a CEO (I repeat the last addendum). Perhaps the CDs of a sold-out musician? Or the ‘how-to’ books of a corporate scumbag. Maybe a giant pile of slogan-infested campaign posters, or the colorful images–which burn colorfully–of a government sponsored PSA? The fucking t-shirt of Che Guevara that you paid 20 Dollars for: Put it in the fire! Actually, burn all your t-shirts, they mean nothing and are a pathetic replacement for actual thought.
There may still be time to save ourselves, and the world itself, but, truth be told, not without a little anger. And a little fire.
Have you considered Subscribing to all of this madness?
Conformity on so massive a scale could only have been accomplished with the aid of the internet.
Our helpless and defeated attitude comes from so many exercises of protest ended in futility on live television, streamed instantly to millions of websites and coming straight from our phones; we’ve accepted reality because we’ve been crushed by the weight of it.
I was a student at Dawson College when a monster decided to mount his own little kernel of rebellion; the story was everywhere in a matter of minutes, the killer’s lifestory was everywhere in a matter of hours and the whole thing was abandoned and forgotten in a matter of days.
It’s hard to make a dent in a system with that kind of momentum.
I wouldn’t completely disagree with you on the role of the internet, and mass-media in general, on this trend. But I do tend to approach such things with the ‘Chicken or egg’ question, meaning: Is the internet a negative force or a neutral tool? Some of these problems date back before the information overload began, but there’s no question that compliance is easier and media is greatly accommodating such ease.
I apologize - I got swept away by the tone of my writing and forgot to write clearly. What I was saying was that as human beings we do have a certain desire for a basic level of conformity - if only to make social interaction more fluid; the internet is the great facilitator, better than any ideology at getting everyone to spout the same stuff - or at least at getting a bunch of large groups spouting their wildly varying but internally homogenous stories.
Combine that with information overload, the piss-poor economic, political and geopolitical situations and an almost universal level of comfort and 24/7 entertainment our generation is privy to… It’s a wonder we manage to bitch about politics at all.