Wake Up, Wake Up, My Riot Child

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

-Frederick Douglass

We toured the local high school yesterday. One of our kids will be heading there in the fall and so we asked to have a little walk-thru. If they could check out the vibe and see the classrooms and all that, we figured, then maybe the build-up might be less scary or intense. Heading to high school, especially one in a new school district, is terrifying. And with good reason too. Everything you have learned (and more importantly: haven’t learned) up until now is about to spit you out into the proverbial jaws of the most savage beast known to man.

For the halls of any American high school are places of reckoning, pure and simple. Stumble and it will swallow you whole. Fuck up and it will spit you out into the nether system. Shine and you will believe that you have arrived….only to discover, soon enough, that it was all a smoke show. And that life never gave a rat’s ass about your popularity or your grades or anything like that. Because in the end, you’re going to get bitch-slapped by the ways of the world.

Enjoy!

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To be fair, the difference between me at 53 years old and my teenagers (or any local kids in general) is basically apocalyptic. I mean, rarely in the annals of history have two or three generations existing side-by-side found themselves so meaningfully separated by such powerful events. I graduated high school so long ago…before the internet/ before cell phones/ before identity politics had exploded in all of our faces. This, in and of itself, causes me to exist on an entirely different plane than the ones my kids and step kids live upon. The gulf between someone like me, who grew up like I did (before the tech revolution of the last 25 years) and kids growing up in the United States right now is wider than any gap between kids and their living elders than ever before.

With maaaaybe the exception of the kids who were born starting like a week or two after fire was first discovered by our most rough and tumble ancestors.

In other words, people born into this world now are living vastly different lives than the ones me and you have known (I’m guessing you’re probably ‘oldish’ like me). I know that goes without saying but it’s wildly important to keep reminding ourselves of this as we begin to wake up and look around ourselves at a nation that appears to be either CRUMBLING or RISING right before our eyes, depending on the person. Or more specifically: depending on the politics of the person.

This is identity politics at work.

It has always been around/ people have always gravitated towards others of their ilk or kind or whatever. But now the stakes have been raised, a million-fold it would seem, by the presence of this sky fall of radically one-sided information sources. Each of us has been able to customize our social media feeds, choose our biased news sources and cull our TV channels into an almost nuclear version of stream-lined single paradigm vision, the likes of which have never-before been known to man.

And lucky you. And lucky me. We are the guinea pigs. We are the last of the old world thrust into the new. Jesus fucking Christ, I mean, no wonder we’re out here steering the whole runaway ship right into the vicious maelstrom. How could we not be? We have no goddamn idea what we’re doing! We have no experience with this kind of thing! We were raised on two or three rather unbiased news sources and now we have had a thousand of them rammed down our throat.

I cry for mercy, you cry for justice. Your neighbor cries for the tightening of the screws…for the reckoning to begin. Whatever that means.

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