October 5, 2006 Issue

A friend of mine recently mentioned that it is people our age who should be deciding policy in our country. The same day I listened to my 12-year-old daughter’s new John Mayer song “Waiting for the World to Change.” The chorus of the song is “One day our generation is gonna rule the population, so we keep on waiting for the world to change.”

I’ve got bad news for Mr. Mayer, who is a generation behind me. Our political system has evolved to a stage that prohibits change, regardless of whose generation is in charge. He can keep waiting.

I am 52 years old and I am a part of the tail end of the baby boomer segment of our population. My generation has seen many changes in our world. But for all the technological innovations in our lifetime, the greatest change occurred during the 1960s.

When I was growing up in the South, segregation was the rule. Schools weren’t the only aspect of our life that were segregated. Water fountains, rest rooms, cafeterias and, believe it or not, athletics were all subject to segregation. In many areas blacks were not able to run for public office.

Attitudes toward music and sex and drugs and all kinds of styles were changing. Long hair was a political statement. Volkswagen vans, tie-dyed shirts, pot and acid, and the Grateful Dead ruled the day.

I was too young to be drafted into the military but Vietnam was a spectre nonetheless.
It was a parallel issue, with the civil rights movement, that consumed our generation.
We fought that war and we lost. We lost not only many of our soldiers but we lost the respect of much of the world. We carried on covert wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador and we were on the wrong side of almost every foreign policy move that was made.

The civil rights movement was much more successful. In a decade, many of the most visceral symbols of inequality were removed. Images of police dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators shocked the world. The words of Dr. King shook our society.

The one thing our generation should have learned is tolerance. Tolerance of other people, other religions, and tolerance of other lifestyles. We grew up with the birth control pill and it led to a sexual openness that had never existed. We smoked pot and we learned that it did not lead to heroin. We fought wars for democracy abroad and we lived through cold wars with China and Russia. Democracy and capitalism seemed to flourish when we left other countries alone. We grew up with gay people who were confined to closets. Those days have passed.

Our generation lived by a code and it was simple. “Do your own thing.” Whatever happened to that? Today the big domestic issues are same sex marriage and abortion. Our attitude should be the one that we followed in the ‘60s. If you don’t like same sex marriage, don’t marry someone of the same sex. If you don’t like abortion, don’t get one.

The leaders of our country do not remind me of the people I knew growing up. People in politics today have been neutered. They can’t speak the truth without consulting polls. They have to behave within a ridiculously rigid framework. They can’t drink or smoke (not even cigarettes.) They have to wear suits and attend church and be married. They have to be boring. And they don’t have to be particularly intelligent.

The people who surround those in power are primarily ass kissing, brown nosing geeks. They have few original thoughts and they serve as yes-men. They discourage open thought and debate.

Ari Fleisher, Bush’s press secretary, spoke directly about the incident after 9-11 when Bill Maher lost his job because of comments about the hijackers. “Call them what you will – but they weren’t cowards.” Fleisher’s message to America was chilling: “We must be careful what we say.”

President Bush is our leader. He represents us to the rest of the world. When he compares the fiasco in Iraq to World War II, he is skipping a much more comparable war. It is a war neither he nor Cheney nor Rumsfeld like to discuss. It is the Vietnam War and it is a war my generation is familiar with.

Eighty percent of the free world think the most threatening country to world peace is not Iraq, Iran, or North Korea; it is the United States. President Bush, as our representative is responsible for that fear. Yet we bear the burden.

These days we need people who are willing to speak up. People who will speak out against ridiculous drug laws. People who will shout about the false issues of gay marriage and abortion. People who will point out that the Muslim religion is no more bizarre than our own holy-rolling, evangelistic, mega-church nonsense.

Few people in government have the guts to speak out about anything. Bill Moyers, who has, through PBS, educated our people on everything from mythology to architecture to religion, is different. We could use more freethinking, free speaking people like Moyers.

He was press secretary to President Johnson, and while saying a prayer before a formal White House dinner he was interrupted by Johnson. “Speak up,” the president roared, “we can’t hear you.”

“I’m sorry Mr. President,” Mr. Moyers replied. “I wasn’t speaking to you.”

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