In one of the memes going around once was, if I remember correctly, the question who would you talk to in history if you had a time machine. My thought was one of my Ioway ancestors. I would have wanted to go back to what they were facing as Anglos encroached. I imagine there were many who said they pitied their children for what they were going to be facing.
There are so many things I think about daily that H.o.p. will be facing as an adult. But I suppose the one that may scare me the most is global warming. The environmental disasters we’re reaping due to not just disastrous policies but the refusal there’s been to face the music as awareness began to dawn. They may not have been talking about global warming, not that I can recollect, when I was eight years of age, but I remember well reading other dire environmental and energy warnings and if these were issues that had begun to be addressed then, instead of corporations and politicians continuing to promote religion of untenable rates of consumption (consumerism being the religion of America) then we’d be well on our way probably to being able to cope, or at least to being able to imagine coping with the future.
When I allow myself to think about it too much, I’m furious with prior generations. And my own, of course, for buying into the same religion of consumerism. Which younger generations have also purchased wholesale. But, you know, there’s supposed to be this thing called the wisdom of your elders, and as far as I can tell its the generation who brought forth the boomers that behaved like fucking children and never stopped behaving like children. They followed in the footsteps of their ancestors always having someone else to rob–and yes that is how I think of it. Remember New Orleans and the news and Right bitching about stores being looted? Well for several hundred years, from sea to shining sea, as Anglos pushed from East to West, it was one big open Wal Mart for them. Thousands upon thousands of square miles and resources they gobbled up like Pac People. Chomp chomp chomp. Big Business and individuals. Every generation earning more than the previous, gobbling up more. People said they did it with their own bare hands, a lie of self sustenance that has been bloated up to abominable proportions and handed down to today. I’m not saying they didn’t work. Yeah, they worked. But whose land and resources were they working? Who had been living on it just a few years previously?
So I look at much of the WWII generation as being the last of the Pac Man generations chomping down on the free goodies of a stolen America. They were reaping the inheritance of the Pac Man generations before them, and very soon the earning power of their grandchildren (and canary children) was going to drop dramatically. But they kept on fucking consuming despite that, convinced that if product was sitting there on the shelves it was just fine to purchase, consume, and toss. They wanted the product. It all felt real good. Toys for children. Lots and lots of toys for children. And what resources went into making it didn’t matter. As long as there was product. Consume, consume, consume. I can’t imagine much of anything more morally degenerate than consuming, consuming, consuming. And to every warning sign they said, “Not so, you’re just trying to make me feel guilty and keep me from consuming, when consuming is our good American life.” That was their wisdom. That was what they had to pass along.
It terrifies me for H.o.p., what he’s going to be facing environmentally. He has no clue right now. Yes, he knows, vaguely, things were once different, but it’s hard for an eight-year-old to understand how different and how much things can change in a short one hundred years. But as he matures he’ll begin to get a clue and y’know what his response should be? “You robbed me, you short-sighted, selfish assholes.”
Every generation coming up, going into adulthood, should have community and the community wisdom of elders guiding. But what we have are corporate communities. And the WWII generation and the boomers are still playing Pac Man, consuming and consuming, but instead of consuming the inheritance of the great sea-to-shining-sea land and resource grab, for a while they’ve been consuming the futures of their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children. And those children are being raised to be Pac Men as well. Gobble, gobble, gobble.
I see very little on the internet that doesn’t reflect the values of novelty-obsessed consumer society. Which is pretty distressing.
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