The Merciless Regime of The Flower Children

Here's the lovely, wonderful, amazingly hypocritical thing about the 60s generation: it was a crock. Everyone loves to talk about how rebellious that generation was, how open-minded, and high-moraled. They rallied behind such noble causes as equal rights, world peace, voting rights, yet once you get by all that, the fact is that these people weren't trying to transfer power from the high to the low; they were trying to transfer power to themselves.

I make this statement because that generation is now the one in power. The rebels have become the empire, and they are just as grudging relinquishing their influence as any generation before them has been. But worse than that, they didn't even hold on to their ideals at all. They still say they were opposed to Vietnam, but how many now support war on Iraq? They say that they are for equal rights, yet they support, hell, encourage the purchase of goods made in sweat-shops.

The generation that was in charge during the 60s garners more respect from me. They may have been horribly prejudiced and conservative, BUT THEY MADE NO EXCUSES ABOUT WHAT THEY WERE. They came from a background that was just that and made no pretense. They didn't grow up calling the system evil then say, "ooops! Now that we're reaping the benefits, the system is just hunky-dory."

The Hippies and Flower children didn't want an establishment that excluded them. Now that they have the power, they don't want one that diminishes their own, bloated needs. They have no problem selling the new generation out with issues such as Social Security. What makes them despicable in my mind is not that reluctance to dilute their influence, but their continued insistence that they "changed the system," that they remain rebellious, that they remain liberal.

Their power came from the fact that they were a generation united: perhaps they all had different causes to fight for, but the single characteristic of the age was rebelliousness. Our generation has no united cause. To quote Chuck Palahniuk, (author of some wonderful books like Invisible Monsters, Choke, and Fight Club):

"We're the middle children of history, no purpose, no place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives."

To put it simply, we have no united cause. We're a generation of Nintendo addicted, Ritalin abusing, crack babies and abortion rejections. Any situation that pits us against our elders will result in our whole sale massacre. The 60s had the focused, "grab the power," "change the world" messages of Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Ours the ineffectual, adolescent, misdirected rage of Limp Bizkit and Eminem. They are united, we are not.

It depresses me that my generation is inferior to bunch of hypocrites. Make no mistake: we need them more than they need us. Our economy is so fucked that few of us will ever be able to afford our own houses and support our families. The few of us who do will be sent running back to our parents' basements when the inflation, caused by the government's inevitable monetizing of our national debt, reduces our savings to nil.

We've been hopeless screwed by these hemp-smoking hypocrites. If I have to read one more account of what wonderful rebellious people they were, I'm going to go on a yuppie killing spree. My generation sucks, but the saving grace of apathy is that it's impossible to whore out.