A Generation without a Cause

We are the last hippie generation. Genius, it would seem, has its flip side.

There was only one Woodstock, only one Bob Marley, only one Jim Morrison and only one wheel. There might have been a time when humanity believed in slavery, in apartheid, in war and in cut-throat business. But, alas! No longer. We are very far, of course, from the pinnacle of our race, if there ever can be such a thing. But the games people play have changed radically. When wanton development came our way and every man was very much like the one next to him, the ones that were the freaks stood out. And they led the others, unwillingly or willingly. But now freaks are a dime a dozen.

All the limits of humanity haven’t been crossed and all the possibilities haven’t been exhausted but the idea of the very possibility of conquering all possibilities has lost its novelty. Narrow-mindedness, hatred, imperialism, hegemony – you name it and the enemy has been faced and unmasked.

Our battles now are fought everyday – against a recession, against our prejudices, against our bosses and clients. And as a generation we do not have a cause to rally for, because we are all far too busy breaking our own boundaries. And there is nothing wrong in that. Just that it sadly limits a poet’s ground. Our tragedies and downfalls are all personal. And if all young blood does not boil for one cause, that also says a lot about the cause. I am not demeaning any of the causes we are fighting for in pockets and groups. But what are we, as a generation, fighting for? Inner peace? Equity?

There will no longer be legends of men who won battles with their own sweat and blood, men who stood their ground like a mountain in a gale, and men who bordered on the superhuman. Not at least in the terms we are familiar with. The Superman has changed. Evolved. And that is a sad fact for all those like me who like the limitedness of a man for its poetry, for its irony. For when man was created, he was an idea, and the color and form and smell he took on were his limitations. And so he is nothing but them. To try to supersede them is to try to kill oneself. As morbid or undesirable as that sounds let me assure you that it is not the least of either.

We might try to reinvent the wheel, like we did to get the qwerty keyboard, but onward we must go. We might wish to have been born somewhere and sometime else, as any who live to see such times. But it is not up to us to choose not to be the limbo that the next generation shall crash through. We will always speak fondly of being the right mix of love and life, the right mix of rebellion and respect, the right mix of ever and never. Maybe other generations have spoken these words, maybe other men who stood on the threshold of universal change have lamented thus the loss of their poetry, but that does not make our loss any less painful.

And the dirt on the beaten path shall ever miss the tread of the short-lived mortal.

It is just considerably saddening for no particular reason. Like all the other considerably saddening things that make us so endearingly human.