Way back in the dim and misted days of high school, I was a watcher and a listener: who said what to whom and how they said it, who did what to whom and why they said they did it. You can pick up quite a lot by keeping your eyes open and your mouth shut.
During those four years (age 14 to 18) you can and should go through a lot of changes, physically, mentally, emotionally, even spiritually.
During my time in that age range, the Vietnam War was raging, and the Amerikan people were being lied to about it. There was always “a light at the end of the tunnel” that the combined armed forces of the richest and most powerful nation the world had yet seen somehow couldn’t reach. But it wasn’t anything that continued unquestioning support on the home front, more money from Congress, and another 50,000 warm bodies couldn’t resolve.
At the low end of that 14 to 18 range, you should be experiencing a higher level of awareness of your surroundings and of the world than you did two years earlier, before you entered what AM radio DJs used to call The Land of Teens.
For me, part of that awareness was questioning what was going on in the country and in the world beyond its borders, particularly in Southeast Asia. Closer to home it was listening more closely to what politicians and other public figures were saying about, as the old Superman TV show put it, “Truth, Justice, and the Amerikan Way.” It should have been clear to everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that they were being sold beach front property in Arizona and large bridges in New York and San Francisco. The operative phrase there is should have been. The reality was no one seemed much bothered by anything except for the sight of college students and “dirty hippies” who dared to oppose the wishes of Congress and the President. And this is when the One Question was first heard: “Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?”
People continued to wear their Amerikan flag lapel pins and buy “America: Love it or Leave it!” bumper stickers. They chanted “Four more years!” when Nixon was up for re-election, having forgotten about his promised but never delivered “secret plan” to end the war that helped get him elected in 1968.
The One Question continued to be asked, and though it would become something of a rallying cry among increasingly politicized 25 and unders, it meant nothing to the millions who gave Nixon the greatest landslide victory the Nation had ever seen in November 1972. When they finally turned on him it was not for his lies about Vietnam, not for his enemies list, and not for his role in the bungled Watergate burglary, but because he was caught on tape calling people bastards and sons of bitches, language deemed unbecoming of an occupant of The Oval Office.
Everything else he did, apparently, was okay. Even my Old Man, not usually prone to idiocy, once said to me, “You know what they’re saying in Russia?”
No, Pop, and neither do you.
“They’re saying, “’What’d he do wrong?’”
Sweet bleeding Jesus!
But that was the attitude: All politicians are crooked, he just got caught.
Now let’s trudge through the sludge of the 80s and 90s and drag ourselves into the present century.
Except for what amounted to a training exercise (and another Clint Eastwood forgettable flick) in Grenada, the US military has continued its losing streak which now stretches all the way back to the “Korean Conflict” (“a police action, not a war”). But the military’s budget gets raised every year for the Big War with Russia or China or both that’s just around the corner. That’s the one we’ll win. Nothing else matters. Just don’t mention collateral damage.
Meanwhile, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, homelessness, hunger, crime, illiteracy, violence, and poverty are at record levels. The education system is an embarrassment. The health care system is a joke. Yes, there are jobs, but they often don’t pay livable wages. And yet there is no national sense of outrage. There are countless special interest groups demanding what they believe to be “their rights” regardless of how they may infringe upon the rights of others, those same Constitutionally-protected rights our elected representatives and the Supreme Court are doing their utmost to strip away.
But Nixon was right, in a sense. Congress is filled with “bastards and sons of bitches” on both sides of the aisle. How do they keep getting elected? Who is voting for them?
No one is responsible for anything. No one can do anything about anything. So let it go.
There is still only One Question, but no one is about to ask it, let alone answer it, because the problem lies not within ourselves, but in foreigners and the Deep State and antifa and the elite and educated people in general and liberals and the mainstream media and Hollywood and any and all minorities and Native Americans and environmentalists and … did I miss anyone? Animal lovers?
Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?
Does it matter? Can anyone even tell anymore?
If you're not angry you're not paying attention. It's really that simple.
Now this is just me, but I think it's intentional we are so dumbed down - busy with stadium sports, dating apps and all the other shit going on. We are close in age Bill and many of us in high school didn't have parents who spoke about news of the day.
It sucks and we should be angry!