“We do not act rightly because we have acted rightly, these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions. We are what we repeatedly do.”
So do better.
I just finished watching Mad Men for the 2nd time about a month ago and it made me want to go back to the 1960s. If only for about 5 minutes until I ran through all that happened in the 60s. You don’t want to have to live through a Presidential assassination. A Presidential candidate assassination and the 1968 election. A minister and non-violent civil rights activist shot in the face by a white supremacist and the 10 days of riots that followed. Vietnam. The Ole Miss riots which lasted a month. The Harlem riots, preceded by the murder of James Powell. The Long Hot Summer of 1967. Stonewall riots. Selma. Cuba.
It was bad then, and it’s bad now. My generation, the last generation to grow up without internet access, has lived through some shit, too. The first Iraq war, Desert Storm, happened when I was in 1st grade. I saw Columbine on the news my freshman year of high school, as scared as any 15 year old, and school shootings continue to happen 10+ times a year for 21 years and counting. 9/11, I was a senior in high school and it robbed us all of a normal adult life. The 2nd Iraq war compelled my dad to help and it greatly diminished his quality of life. I can’t count how many kids from my generation signed up, two from my high school never made it back. And we were young, naive kids, man. We didn’t know what we were in for, we had no idea that nothing would ever be the same again. The housing market collapsed and the recession that followed happened right as my generation was out of college and into our first real, adult job, only a few years away from buying our first house.
Then Obama got elected. It felt like the first real, communal thing that happened in my life. It felt like real change brought on by young people fed up with the establishment, that we could actually make change for the better without the unrest of the past, if you elected the right people things can be better, the system can work for you.
That didn’t last.
Next came the 2010 mid-term elections which changed politics forever. I’ve written about it before, but that was the point in time where I really started to pay attention to politics with Scott Walker’s union-busting. I still can’t believe we re-elected a black man in between two mid-term elections that completely undermined all of his progress. We were eight years in power, and we have almost nothing positive to show for it.
We’ve been through three years with this President and my God, with the amount of shit that’s happened it seems like five. It almost feels like an experiment of how much can the people of this country handle without hitting their breaking point. Charlottesville seems quaint right now.
How is this winning? And why can’t the President just say the right thing for once in his life as President?
We’ve bared witness to one of the most corrupt Presidential administrations this country has ever endured, and unless Joe Biden can win where it matters come election day 2020, this is just a prelude to what life will be like 5, 10, 20 years from now. I’m not an alarmist or whatever you call it, but good lord this is so fucking bad. Innocent people being shot at with rubber bullets for sitting on their porch at night. Peaceful protesters tear-gassed because the President wants to take a walk to a church he doesn’t attend, for a photo op holding a bible he’s never read, in a city he doesn’t want to be in. And all the Congressional Republicans feigned ignorance or offered no comment.
In order to make change, we have to do it ourselves and we have to elect people who will do it.
My generation has been asking since Amadou Diallo because we weren’t old enough for Rodney King. It seems like Rodney was the last to live and tell about it.
