Why Last night saved my generation

We are the generation to end all generations. Children of a blind Cicero, anguish detracted shells for corporate impregnation. Honest expression of our repression is reflected in our Ipods, our primitive obsession with formless function, our acute lack of serendipity in the face of an ever complex cosmic now.

 

Last night I saw a small glitch in the matrix. A broad baby ripple that spread across the enormity of our value laden space-time mesh. It was as if a baton had been handed to the last human on earth – and the race was necessary not for our survival but for our ontological vindication. After almost 40 years – the hopes, the dreams, the cynical formalism was washed away in November rain.

 

And I was there. In the middle of it all – within this hallowed cocoon of self denial that lay dying on DCs sidewalks – was our generation – in the throes of its political legitimacy- awkward and scared – ruminating on the promethean burden of our lack of identity. As the fractured veins of the military-industrial complex bled dry in front of our eyes – we were enveloped by a festival – One that we had crafted from the hesitant whispers that had started this revolution.

 

And we walked through the “negro streets of dawn” clutching each others dreams with more pain than our reckless lives could justify – with more love than our asphalt promenades could withstand . Like prophets of an era that had begun the day we were born.

 

From K street to the White house, from Mount Pleasant to the capitol – we walked as if this was the first day of the rest of our lives – We became our own salvation. In our songs of freedom, was the sublime nakedness – the nakedness of that final feeling that absolves you from everything.

 

And as the wave crashed over the organs of this great nation – I thought of that fateful day in 1963 when the reverend had talked in front of Lincoln. His voice has been steady and his arguments human – He had said “We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now”. He had spoken of a brave new world, one that needed more courage to live in than to build. As I looked at the spectacle around me I thought – Free at last, free at last , Thank god almighty we are free at last.

 

And all it took was a dark knight from an atrophying Midwestern city, whose rhetoric finally shattered forty years of social apathy and saved my generation.