It always starts with these three words: "In the Sixties?."
Chances are if you?re a member of a generation
dubbed Gen X, which I suppose means
you're in your late twenties or thirtysomething,
at least one person told you that young
people in the Sixties were less apathetic than
your no-good generation.
The sixties were cool. You are not.
They protested. You didn?t.
They cared about social injustice.
You don?t.
Some looked to the right (the children of the
Reagan Revolution) for comfort only to
find that your generation was full of slackers
who had succumb to moral relativism
and "the liberal values" of the sixties.
Clearly we had the worst of both worlds.
We were hedonist, only interested in sex
and drinking with no social conscious or moral
compass. Evidently, other generations
of college students had little or no interest
in sex and drinking. Who knew?
Why, when we start categorizing generations and
ascribing to them various characteristics,
are we invariably blathering on about "college
students"? One reason is that those who
blather are themselves card carrying members
of the Starbucks-latte-drinking, degree-having
crowd and they like blathering about themselves,
if even critically, because, of course,
present company is excepted.
Those who go on to military service or a job aren?t
as prone to being turned into ping pong
balls to volley across the table in hopes of
scoring points in a supposed culture war.
(Nobody?s keeping score in this conflict anyway,
the point is to have sides to choose,
that would be impossible if someone were to win.)
When it comes to actual, as opposed to cultural
war, we almost never put the
Grande-decafe-latte-with-skim-mild herd on the
front lines. I mean, you could get hurt.
Woody Guthrie said that some men rob you with
a gun and some men rob you with a
fountain pen. Apparently some men go to
war with a gun and others get tax cuts.
Who am I to talk? The only time I served
in uniform was when I worked at a fast food
restaurant in high school.
My experience of Gulf War was watching a green
screen on CNN. It lit up in certain
areas at times and that meant we were winning.
Then I'd go to class.
It had all the visceral impact of the first generation
of video-game tennis. "I remember,"
I caught myself saying to my friend's 16-year-old
sister, "when you tried to move the little
stick up or down so you could send the dot across
the screen." She looked at me like I was old.
Who's going to the front lines in Iraq?
Traditionally there are two groups that lopsidedly get
sent to the front lines: minorities and poor
rural whites. A war in Iraq is going to have a front line,
unlike Bosnia and Kosovo and much of the Gulf
War, which were fought from the air.
I think about that and any envy I had for the
Sixties is gone. I'm skeptical about defining
people as members of a certain generation, but
there are events that hit people in their guts
and shape them and their contemporaries - the
Kennedy assassination, the events of 9/11.
Art also hits us in our guts, or at least should.
Reality TV, which is anything but real, serves
to reassure us that we are smarter than those dumped
or duped on "Joe Millionaire." Art makes
us realize the universal nature of our suffering and folly.
The United Nations has put a blue curtain up around
Picasso's Guernica, a painting that depicts
the fascist bombing in the Spanish town of Guernica.
It was deemed an inappropriate backdrop
for a discussion of using force in Iraq.
So, like pornography it must be covered up.
Laura Bush was to host a poetry reading at the
White House but it was cancelled, because the
poets might be against the war or worse, read
poetry depicting war's horrors.
Poets and painters are being asked to depart with
their X-rated trash that belongs nowhere near
our consideration of war, lest our leaders blush.
Whether you support a war in Iraq or not, I doubt
the way to support our troops is to disassociate
ourselves from the sacrifice we ask of them.
Patriotism does not consist of how enthusiastically
one puts others in harm?s way.
If conflict is not averted, let?s hope that our
sons and daughters, brothers and husbands come home.
When they come home, with scars and stories and
pain, let's hope we don?t have to cover them up,
lest our leaders blush.
Stephen Sacco is a playwright and freelance writer.
He lives in Savannah, GA and New York City.