Yesterday's Men

This still isn't a political post, but I am well aware of the many burgeoning developments across all spectra that I have yet to write about (Pakistan, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Iowa/New Hampshire, reasonable accommodation, the Hajj, and dearest Iraq, amongst others). But this one I am absolutely compelled to get out.

I begin thusly.

Where are we? Marvin Gaye asked it so: "What's Goin' On?" Cristobal Huet, is this what modern life has come down to? Four thousand years of documented civilization and Abrahamic religions, and we in North America, Europe and the modern West have gotten to the point where we're fixated on celebrities? On T-Pain, Sean Kingston, Pirates of the Caribbean and Saw 4? Art? Know any modern artists? Nah. Music besides the sonic torture they feed you down at the discotheques and over the airwaves? Television that is there to sell you things and give you migraines? The liberation of women corrupted and rebranded as makeup ads and sexual promiscuity?

My overarching point, dear friends, is that the angry young men have departed. Casting off misinterpretations of sexism, the current generation is done for. In the past, angry young men and women reformed and changed a world they saw as unjust, immoral or adrift. The culture we as twentysomethings (born 1980-1987) so casually soak in every day has seeped in through our skins and skulls. More so than any political or social idea, more so than the multiple wars overseas or any election or spiritual movement, the modern culture has had a profound effect on our personalities and mindsets.

Everything wrong now with people and public affairs is because of it. When I say people, I don't mean society. The term 'society' itself means nothing. You'll have a hard time finding sociologists agreeing on a common definition of it. By people, I mean individuals: the average Joe or Jane.

People act and think differently than they did in the past. Basic one-to-one relationships have changed in the way they function. Families are both dissolving, and simultaneously being rendered irrelevant in a way unprecedented in normal human history. Neighborhoods are not places where you feel comfortable letting your younger siblings hang out. Suspicion drives your feelings on your neighbors. Schools, pfff, forget about 'em. Cities are hives of villainy, out of control, where the rich make their fortunes and the poor slave away, hanging on a thread. Where noise and a perpetual sense of being late drives people to sin and hopelessness.

Beyond the effect on human beings, the forces that pushed human development forward throughout history have been co-opted. Religion, one of the key social forces for countless centuries, has been declared a threat; its overtly spiritual practitioners considered positively nuts. Art, another crucial force, has been utterly castrated and relegated to weekly box-office grosses, personality cults and Sotheby's auctions.

Media and information are lies, half-truths and statistics. Or merely opinion, speculation and entirely useless "debates" between two equally daft people who supposedly represent the two sides to political issues. Because obviously every possible political viewpoint can be narrowed down to exactly two all-encompassing sides. And advertising rules all.

I'm speaking in generalities, yes. And I make a lot of mentions of "history," as well as you may have noticed. This is not for self-aggrandizing purposes. I am pointing out one very fundamental fact of modern life.

Things are fucked.

Sure, you could say that things were always bad, and there are good and bad points. Alas, I point again towards history. People all too often forget the context in what we are living. Six years ago, there was no 9/11. Ten years ago, there was practically no Internet. Twenty years ago, the U.S.S.R. was still the Evil Empire and always ready to annihilate Western civilization, and rap hadn't hit. Fifty years, blacks went to separate schools and had separate restaurants, and rock n' roll was still a regional fad. Sixty-five years, and we were in the biggest war humanity had and has ever seen. Eighty years: women weren't citizens and couldn't vote. Go beyond that, and you'll really start tripping out.

Can you imagine such things? Eighty years is a lifetime yes, but there are still plenty of people around who were alive during such times. In the scheme of modern history, even a century is a fraction of how far we've come. Try to realize that the way life was around the year 1900, or 100 years ago, was how life had pretty much been for the five hundred years prior to that.

Farms, small towns, horses and carriages, top hats, all that Charles Dickens stuff.

Now look at today.

Something happened in the last 60 years particularly that caused a total explosion in development and technological progress that has never been seen. We went, in one lifetime, from records to iPods, cars to MAGLEV trains and Predator drones, snail mail to cellphones, radio to the Internet. Cameras watch our every move, companies and people we'll never meet know and share our medical records, our Internet and spending habits, our employment history, our most private secrets.

Technology has changed daily life irrevocably. Economics and the international credit/banking/currency system has gotten unimaginably complex and dominating. World politics just went through two massive reorganizations (the fall of the Soviet Union, and the War on Terror). History is moving forward incredibly fast.

The thing that frightens me though is that, despite everything, only us people haven't caught up.

=//Turnquest

* I'll continue this line of reasoning by examining the modern dating environment, next post.