Very nice, wolfdaddy. Thank you.

As a result of this e-mail, I'm pretty furious with the hippies right now. How dare you? How dare you judge your progeny, for whom you presume to fear? How dare you tell us it's up to "us" to have a revolution? By why example should we set the standards for "our" revolution? Yours? Fuck that. Please illuminate me: by what standards do you judge your "revolution" to have had a positive impact on the culture and the world that followed you? The culture and the world that you helped to create?

I could say more, but I am wayyyy too angry. Angry at the presumption of this attitude, and it's not uncommon, amongst people my parents age. "Do for yourself" it says, by people who did for themselves without any regard to the long-term consequences of their actions. Which, in the end, is endemic of the human species. Hippies are no different. Take some god damn responsibility for your actions. Your counter-culture and your revolution and your "me" generation was pretty self-important and -centered. Don't act so suprised that you left a generation in your wake that is full of self-doubt.

Oh, by the way, didn't see you at the protest (y'know, on the anniversary of our invasion of Iraq) Sunday. Of course, I wasn't there either. Where I live, a city that contains millions, the amount of people that thought to mark the day by protesting their government's actions and decisions numbered less than 50.

I think that's something we should both think about.

Well, I can't see the video here at the office, but I read the transcript. Pretty powerful.

wolfdaddy, I'm afraid I didn't get the same message from the video as you got from the email from your mother's friend and am thus lacking the same reaction to her call to revolution. That closing argument was eloquent and beautiful, though; deftly placing in stark light some incredibly uncomfortable realities.

The camera work was atrocious, but I liked the speech. Just gelling things that we've all been saying.

Frisbee Girl, the text of the e-mail combined with a link to a video of a TV show, does not a revolution make. Nor even a call to a revolution. And I'm dumbfounded this type of e-mail is even making the rounds by authors who DO seem to feel that it is a call to revolution.

Granted, the speech is powerful, it's well-written and well-acted, and it's a summary of ideas of which we should all already be aware.

It in and of itself is NOT enough to inspire to do more than write back to her and actually ask her why she wasn't at the protests on Sunday. Was she watching Boston Legal?

It's this kind of--dare I say it?--generation gap that many people my parents age seem unable to bridge. They couldn't do it with their parents and now they in many many cases cannot do it with their now-approaching-middle-age-children. It frustrates and angers me, I guess. As someone who was a latchkey kid in the seventies and gay in the eighties, I've had to deal with a lot of things completely on my own, with no help or wisdom or guidance--absolutely none at all--from the generation that precedes mine. Yet said generation presumes to be enlightened enough to fear for mine.

That sparks my internal cynic and makes me bite off the question, "are you just afraid that we're going to be unwilling or unable to take care of you in your coming dotage?" I mean, if our generation is going to be having a revolution, we're not going to have time to do that. Just like they didn't have time to pay attention to us during their revolution. This seems so clear to me, yet opaque to many others. The tactics and methods used to foment some kind of cultural revolution today simply won't be the same ones as used then. But the presumption of the "me" generation is that they will be. Or so it reads to me, sometimes.

Now I gotcha.

I share a bit of your background (latchkey in the seventies), as well as receive the same messages from my parental figures. Though in many respects I feel emotionally close to them, I never have idealogically and felt quite lost for guidance for years, even on some of the most basic life skills. I don't get mad anymore, though. I believe we share the blame in certain breakdowns in dialogue, but these days, I find it easier to nod and continue on a path that makes sense to me and those I've chosen to surround myself with.

Which isn't to say that I don't think they don't know of which they speak or are useless as generational force, merely that I have no sense of having had a baton or torch passed on to me. Or if it has been passed on it feels more like a curio at times than a powerful tool or symbol embued with meaning. And, that, I'm ok with, not out of apathy, but because I'd rather have a firm understanding of what I'm working toward than be told what my values and tactics should be. I'd rather own my battles rather than adopt someone else's by defualt, I guess, is the short answer.

Ok, now I think I'm repeating myself, but you rite gud, to, wuffdaddy. In all, seriousness, thanks again, for the link and the comments. You got me to thinking.