I went out last night with a friend who I haven't seen in a while. We spent the first half of the evening catching up on our, respective, lives. Engaging in the comforting back and forth of "how are you?", "how's your job?", "your lovelife?", "your complete lack of a lovelife?", "your family?", "what are you doing for Christmas?", and so on and so forth. After we had talked about what had been filling our days and evenings since we last saw each other since summer (hard to believe it had been almost 5 months but that's how friendships often function in New York -- sporadically) we moved on to talk about, you know, the incredibly bizarre and genuinely terrifying state of the world.
Perhaps, because it's the end of the year or because I spend many hours of my day being bombarded with information (of my own free will, mind you) I have lately been more dismayed than usual by the utter shittyness of the news. Joyce's qoute about history being a nightmare from which he was trying to awake strikes me, now, more than ever to be totally relevant and reading the newspaper is becoming a truly stomach churning affair. It's curious too, I feel the more information I absorb, the more powerless I feel. Especially reading, hearing, or seeing news about the war in Iraq which, day-by-day, seems more and more like a genuine hell on this earth with the Pentagon unable to entirely censor the images of exploding buses and smoking mosques.
Not to be a total Debbie Downer but looking at the world and feeling any kind of hopefulness right now would take a few esctasy pills and a fifth of bourbon. I have to admit to being slightly depressed even if it is the "most wonderfulllll time of the yearrrrr" and I know I am getting a long covted for i-pod for Christmas (finally a tried and true member of the Born to Buy generation). Now, I must also admit that I have, as of late, been nursing a slight fixation on the Baby Boomer generation, the generation raised by the "Greatest Generation", the generation that gave us George W. Bush but also Bill Clinton, the generation that gave us Oprah Winfrey, and Steve Jobs, and Katie Couric, and Ken Lay to name just a few. A boomer was anyone born post-World War II when western Europe was dragging itself out of the mire and the U.S. economy was booming from all the toasters and nuclear warheads it was making and selling.
For the record, the Boomers gave us the S.U.V and the i-pod, and Wal-mart and our feudal 21st century economy of Warlord/Shareholder and Serf/Service Employee and with it the end of pensions and the shredding of any social or civil contract put in place during the Great Society. I am going to be bold and unforgiving and say: I don't like the Boomers very much. They were born (en masse) and they partied (en masse) and they trashed the planet (en masse) and now they are going to try and stay as long as possible (en masse) and and we, their children (who are fewer), are going to be here to clean up their mess.
They are like the world's worst party guests and we will be picking up their trash and cleaning up for a long time after they've left.
Harumph. Needless to say, hope springs enternal (and who am I to doubt that cliche) but mine has just taken a quick vacation. I hope it returns in time for the New Year.
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