Another day another school shooting, this time in California. Californians might suggest we burn sage. But smudging will not realign the feng shui of our burned out inner cities. Real investment in our people is what is required. Occupiers were drawn to the cities to find their voice. Rather than help them coalesce into a greater understanding that what they sought was a hopeful future and what was required could be obtained through reason, we tormented them with pepper spray showers.
OWS was our Iran moment, our Arab spring. But this bubbling democracy of our voiceless youth was too messy. They said childish things that sounded too naively socialistic and purposeless. The danger was that they could be manipulated by a radically left wing conspiracy to seek out the assets of the elite, and this mob was too anarchist even for the Democratic mayors to tolerate so they were quashed.
Yet they were at least able to express an instinct that this economic tsunami that washed so many good people out of their jobs was not equitable. They also instinctively knew that their dreams of owning their own homes and businesses had vanished for many for a generation. And they too could see the billions of criminal financial deals continuing to position investment houses to destroy people’s retirements while their government crawled impotently into a fetal position. Whether in gutted inner cities or in the childhood bedrooms of their parent’s homes from which they were now imprisoned, theirs would be a lost generation.
And now, in the aftermath of what was to be a peaceful, nationwide demonstration intended to be a voice of reasoning, to allow an outlet of understanding in the wake of our economic disaster, now we see violent sparks of mass gun aggression like dangling wires on a cracked electric pole in the wake of a socially disturbed earthquake. We wonder if this is just the beginning of the damage we will uncover as the lost generation crawls out of the sewers.
So here we are thirty five years after running into China, wondering what has happened but we can never get back what we lost and 2008 has taken what it has. We are where we are, gutted inner cities, a lost millennial generation, and all. We can hear the faint remnants of the occupiers as a call to reason but we instead choose to defiantly knee jerk into our further inner sanctum of a police state, righteously defending our turf from whatever ill will we perceive this karma to be. Perhaps, instead we can choose to reassess our point in life and choose to progress from here, to create a future for this generation, to give them hope.
Clif Carothers
Job Voucher Plan 