Taking Stock

“We were right

                                                But we didn’t listen to our song

                                                We were right

                                                Now we’ve become what we thought was wrong”

I wrote those words about four decades ago. It was then intended to express my impression of my generation – the one that came of age in the sixties. At the time, I was hoping that the future would prove me wrong. Sadly, not so much.

We were the peace and love generation of the sixties. We entered our adulthood with the idea that we could re-make the world into a much more perfect place to live. We started that future out with sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Corporations were the enemy. The corporate god of money and the elderly corrupt politicians were what was dragging our country down faster than a bottle of barbiturates. Those were the wrongs that we wanted to right. We were for peace and love.

That mission lasted about as long as Chris Christie on a diet.

Now it’s more than forty years since. What have we wrought? Let’s take stock. And I don’t exempt myself from this analysis.

Corporations are the enemy? Let’s see how that turned out.

Other than maybe Henry Ford, I don’t think that while I was in college, I could have named a single CEO of a major company. Now, those people are celebrities. Now Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and their ilk are at the top of the fame pyramid. They are the exalted ones whose lives are plastered all over People Magazine. 

The exaltation of CEOs would be bad enough, but we took it a step further. We also exalt the cluster of crooked gamblers who masquerade as “options traders”, “derivative brokers”, and my particular favorite – “venture capitalists.” They may soon start carving a space for Warren Buffet on Mt. Rushmore. As long as Jim Cramer gets high ratings, our generation has little to be proud of.  

Peace and love. Peace and love.

How about our anti-war credo? Hah!

Oh, yeah, we sang with Phil Ochs in his anthem, “We Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” and Country Joe when he shouted, “One-two-three what are we fightin for?”  We threw the ROTC off campus, sometimes violently. We resisted all efforts to enlist us into the military. And now, well, now it takes time to list just the number of wars we have been in during our adulthood: Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Panama, The Gulf, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Yemen. And that’s only the major ones. But we don’t call them “wars” anymore. Now they are “interventions.” Maybe that makes us feel better. That reminds me, how many of those “interventions” have improved our lives? 

Peace and love. Peace and love.

And then there is our politics. 

Our goals haven’t been completely abandoned. We did some good things for civil rights. Our chidren and grandchildren see race and gender in much more inclusive and healthy ways than did our prior generations. We can take some credit for that. At least, so far. The problem is that we have now saddled those future generations with a Supreme Court that would be happier if the year was 1953 and not 2023. They want to turn back time and given enough time, they will. 

There have been basically three Presidents who grew up when we did, who are basically our age (Obama is younger). They are that we must claim as our own. They are Clinton (an impeached liar); George W (the WMD wars that led to nothing but devastation); and, of course, the Defendant. The Defendant, though, cannot be described in a mere parenthetical. He deserves his own paragraph.

Where we were supposed to be all about cooperation, the Defendant is all about winning. Where we were supposed to be all about caring for others, the Defendant is all about animosity. And where we were supposed to be all about love, the Defendant is all about hate.

None of us can hide our heads and pretend that we aren’t at least partly responsible for the Defendant. He is one of us and during the time we have been influential, we elected him I’m not saying that one generation is necessarily responsible for everyone in that generation. That would be crazier than the stuff I usually say. No, all I’m saying is that the Defendant is the perfect example of our disloyalty to our goals. He exemplifies the person that we have come closer to becoming than the one that we imagined we would be. And we made him President and we may do it again.

Peace and love. Peace and love.

                                                We were right

                                                But we didn’t listen to our song

                                                We were right

                                                Now we’ve become what we thought was wrong