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I'll date myself for suggesting this, but I've had about enough of 35 year olds -- whose faces haven't even formed yet -- trying to run a country that has a vicious history and nuclear and biological arsenal to match.
So, Generation Y, meet Preparation H.
You've only known government from the time of Reagan, at best. It was after Reagan's inaugural ball and those first 100 days when the downtown section of Salinas -- the place where the latest crop of city fathers and mothers have stuck the Steinbeck Center -- was hit with a sociological bomb. Where only days before I could walk unmolested to my job selling PC's to your parents so that you could be "competitive" with your peers, suddenly I was dodging babbling schizophrenics and their more paranoid counterparts on the streets of the town where John Steinbeck grew up.
Steinbeck died in 1967, perhaps knowing that his Texas friends were involved in the murder of the Boomer Generation's greatest hope for cultural renewal, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Life will break your heart like that, from time to time, without any help from some stooge B-actor who, it can now be said, suffered from Alzheimer's much earlier in his first administration than anyone was ever publically told. But I am fairly confident that George Herbert Walker Bush knew and, once the plan A assassination attempt went down in flames, plan B would be a much easier sell to the traumatized wife, Nancy, and the semi-lucid Ronny. My point, and I do have one, is that Steinbeck got off easy. He didn't have to see his hometown turned into a joke of its former self as the treatment of the mentally ill took a 100 year step backward in time.
Whereas before Reagan, and to a certain extent Nixon, the substantially mentally compromised were kept safely from the streets and away from those who will always be homeless by choice, now these sick people were demonized, labelled as leeches on the social fabric, and turned out onto the streets to suffer the barbaric fate that only the streets of a competitively-obsessed society can dish out.
Maybe you Gen-Y kiddies can bullshit yourself into believing that a paranoid schizophrenic can be easily mainstreamed into the rest of society, but I've worked with these people up-close and personal, and I'm convinced: they're really not faking mental illness just to get three hots and a cot. These people are ill and, to a large extent, either abandoned or their confused and frightened families are left to cry out for help from a social safety net that had just been pulled out from beneath them. By a President who was mentally ill and in a state of decline, and an amen-corner with clear ties to the ideological pedigree of Nazi Germany.
Coincidence that the Nazi's "de-loused" and, oops, murdered, millions of their social pariahs for the sake of "eugenics?" What to do, what to do with the evidence but burn it into dust. One of my high school janitors from Salinas survived the ordeal of waking up outside one of the death camps to the smell of burning corpses. He couldn't get that goddamn smell out of his brain even 40 years later. The people who fed, clothed and armed these monsters were put into power in November, 1963, but their real cruelty did not begin until Ronald Wilson Reagan took office in January of 1981.
We can quibble as to the "real" origins of fascism, my faceless proto-fascist Gen-Y'ers, but that would miss the point: you little 35 year old shits actually believe the garbage uncritically pedalled by your overworked, underpaid, overmonitored and undersupported high school teachers: it's in your history book, so it must be true. Just like in the Bible.
Not even close, boys and girls.
That the cynical wing of a wholely proto-fascist movement uses Gen-Y'ers to do its legwork in making the world safe for global enslavement and oppression is hardly surprising: like most 35 year olds, you know just enough to be dangerous to yourselves and your families. What is appalling is the over-the-top, self-satirizing and altogether cynically evil manner in which you have been programmed to operate against your own best interests. Just to fit "in" with those believed to be with the "in" crowd.
What Kennedy's speeches and actions taught me -- and LBJ's many treacheries cautioned me -- was that underestimating your opponent's power or overestimating the power of your own ability to be brutal can be fatal. If you have a choice, choose courage and death over a life made of machiavellian cynism, assassination and cruelty. Both will kill you just as dead, but living a life of self-attack is far more horrifying and frightening.
What you have seen these past 8 years goes beyond any precedent I am aware of save Nero. This is not the government our Founders intended and it is our joint duty to clean up the mess made by people who think they can win in a game that has been rigged from the beginning for them to lose. Chase dollars, lose your self respect, just in time for those truly in charge to devalue your dollars and making you want to claw yourself out of your own skin.
Turn off your TV and hit the streets. Not Denver, but definitely somewhere in Texas. Spend Texas' money because they deserve to take the hit for hauling thousands of protestors from out of state and putting them in detention. Make them pay, don't make a "blue" state waste its resources hosting your civil disobedience. Be like Martin Luther King Jr and take the fight into the teeth of the lion.
