I was born in 1959, a last gasp baby boomer. I was in the last wave of that giant group. My childhood wandered through the 60s and early 70s. Growing up in the sixties and seventies makes my inclusion in that large generation more of a clerical error than a reality. So, I’m a member in name only, which has always kind of bothered me. I missed the biggest social revolution since the roaring 20s by a few years. I saw it on television, heard it on the radio, but I wasn’t part of it.
It has bothered me all my life. I can’t really say I would have been brave enough to participate in anti-war rallies knowing it might have led to an angry cop smashing a Billy club over my head (almost everywhere), or a soldier bayoneting me (Democratic National Convention, Chicago, 1968), or shooting me (Kent State University, Kent Ohio, 1970). Certainly it was a time where our country was approaching the edge. And I was on the other edge, the safe edge, small town Nebraska, watching it play out on the evening news on television. I don’t remember thinking, “Man, I wish I was there.”
I distinctly remember thinking, “I’m glad I’m not there” when the news flashed to the video of soldiers screaming in agony and fear, camouflaged by explosions and gunfire when the newsman recounted the dead people claimed that day by Search and Destroy in the jungles of Vietnam.
There is a sense that I missed something, though. Something profound. A movement, a meaning for all the senseless tragedy and endless boredom that sweeps across modern society. But there is nothing. I still have the overwhelming feeling of being on the outside and looking in, everybody else was in the play and I was the only person in the audience.
Now, I watch the news, read the paper, and scenes that the Original Not Ready for Prime Time Players would say are too absurd to act out in a skit on SNL play out across the screen, spill from the pages. There are people accusing elected officials of fascism for requiring wear face masks. Fascism!
There was a school board meeting in the affluent suburb of Worthington Ohio where anti-mask protesters were performing a Nazi salute while accusing, one would suppose, the school board members of being fascists. They had to be removed by the police. The agenda for the meeting had no items for face masks or vaccines. It was a school board meeting in all its glorious blandness, hidings, promotions, retirements. The school district superintendent had to email the parents apologizing for the callous display, and reminding everyone the school board meeting is no place for Nazi re-enactments. Seig heil, baby.
In New York City a restaurant hostess asked three women for their vaccine passports, a requirement in the city. It led to an argument, and an assault. A forty four year old woman, her twenty one year old daughter and their forty nine year old tag team partner punched and slapped the 22 year old hostess, almost knocking over the hostess stand. The three women were arrested, and charged, and the hostess refused transportation to the hospital. Make America Great Again?
The line in the sand has been drawn, face masks and vaccines. An immovable object and an irresistible force, and the collision will probably decide the fate of our country. We are dancing on the edge and the future looks bleak, the present looks doesn’t look all that promising. I spend a lot more time thinking, “Man, I’m glad I’m not there.” Sometimes I think, “Man, I wish I wasn’t here.” More to the point I wonder how did we ever get here, and is there any way to turn back?
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This post is republished on Medium.
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