Talking about my degeneration

OK. Fuck it. The 20th century is almost over. The Boomers were supposed to erase the stain of original sin and make it a happy planet where we all hold hands like a fucking Coca Cola ad. Didn't work out that way.

We're we doomed from the start? Was the deck rigged. Is this a case of historical inevitability?

Nah.

My working ontological model is historical evitability. "No fate," as John Connor once said. I.e., if you rewound the universe to say, Nov. 22, 1963, Oswald might've missed. That said, there's a main tide of events with a broadly predictable flow -- for both societies and individuals.

In other words, most of the time, us Naked Apes are all fairly robotic. We have free will -- sometimes -- like a fish leaping out of the water. Then it's possible to break the pattern. A moment of grace, ya want to put it that way. These moments are offered. Humans being humans, we usually fuck up.

So, OK -- WWII being, basically, the collateral damage of Charlie Manson with his own country -- it was still a moment of grace for the Land o' the Free. Silver linings and all that. We gained a sense of "solidarity" as a pinko might say. "We're all in this together," as Harry Tuttle once said.

Not only solidarity, but righteous solidarity, baby. As I said before, the 60s revolution wasn't a rejection of our parents' values -- we were taking those values seriously. We're the good guys. We're the Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger doesn't !@#$ing burn kids alive.

So, my generation (with the exception of the YAF and apolitical cartoonists) took to the streets -- with brains full of shithead ideology in many instances -- but committed nonetheless. We were going to change the world and all that shit. The world changed us. The Man took a dump on our moment of grace. Ain't nothing inevitable about it, IMHO. It was a very clever long con.

Which is a sneaky way of dumping responsibility on the Man. To put it more bluntly ...

The Boomers had a chance. We sold out. We fucked up.

We could have changed history, yeah. But we didn't.

But the Great Boomer Fuck-up is just history now. Ironic, ain't it?

Yeah, despite all our big talk, here we are up to our necks in a world of shit. Sorta don't matter how we got here or how inevitable it was.

My working hypothesis: We're living in the universe in which George Bailey killed himself.