What Would Lennon Do?
Published February 12, 2008
By Colin Lucas
My brother, Pat, spent New Year’s Day with his Marine unit picking up improvised explosive devices off the banks of the Euphrates River.
I, however, and most of the rest of America’s domestically-bound eighteen to twenty-one year-olds spent that day picking our noses waiting.
We are waiting because that is our political prerogative. That is our purpose within the democracy which we have been told is the greatest such polity on earth. That is our constitutionally ordained right. But we have not always waited.
When Marines were being ordered to burn villages in Vietnam the kids back home were tye-dying the streets of Washington with massive peace protests that sent chills up the spine of Capitol Hill. When Martin Luther King, Jr., preached his dreams to America, he was preaching to the youth because he knew them to be the only ones with enough passion and audacity to mobilize the kind of change that was needed.
Yet those same protesters were by and large unable to vote. They could not make their mark in the political arena even if they wanted to, so they stirred and rallied and made themselves heard. They staged revolutions of defiance.
But in 1971 the twenty-sixth amendment gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, and though the spirit of protest continued on for another decade, enfranchisement calmed the nerves of America’s youthful and fiery conscience.
And so began the waiting.
Now, instead of clinging to our precious first amendment, whose rights of speech and association were once being invoked en masse and without pause, we are silent. We are crippled by an amendment that inspires three and a half years of apathy punctuated only by brief periods of participation during elections, regardless of how disturbing the state of affairs have become.
The campaign season seems to have been extended threefold, so instead of concentrating on the problems that are currently vexing our society we simply sit and listen and bullshit ourselves into thinking that holding debates a full year before the election means that our democracy is working.
We are so anxious for change that we turn to the electoral process, thinking it the best mechanism to bring about change. And rightly so. But every four years is simply not enough. We will still not have a new president until 2009.
That is why my dreams of late have turned to revolution. Not an overthrow, as the connotation of “revolution” often suggests, but a rekindling of America’s youth that will boldly provoke a response from a sluggish and decidedly unresponsive establishment.
Granted, there has not been a draft and segregation is not a legislated fact, key motivators of past mass- mobilizations.
But American men and women - boys and girls, even, if eighteen qualifies - are in the Middle East getting slaughtered daily and slaughtering others. Washington reeks of corruption. And now President Bush is asking Congress to pass a $3.1 trillion budget.
I know in my bones that either a woman or a black man will be forging a better path for Washington within a year; but too much can happen in that year for campaign-watching to be our only form of political participation.
Pray for a change if you will, but the reincarnation of John Lennon, not Jesus, is is what we need to mobilize us. Unfortunately, Lennon, who kindled the fire of peaceful protest in the sixties, was assassinated.
However, sensing that an an extraordinarily popular rockstar with ideals made of gold is not in our near future, I have searched
m my soul for an answer to what we need to engage us as we have been in times past, as we are capable of being.
I am tired of the treacherous old men who have been ruling for too long, so I ask myself, “Where is our revolution?” What can I do to become an enemy of the state, as those who instill dissent and incite action have always become? Our movement will not happen in the blogosphere, it must happen on the streets.
The youth did, we must remember, fight for the voting age to be lowered in light of eighteen-year-olds’ being sent to fight in Vietnam. This was all in good sense, but the unintended consequences have been this campaign-induced paralysis of our national conscience. The ratification of the twenty-sixth amendment was actually an act of political brilliance because it has chained the protest contingent to our living rooms.
By concentrating on insignificant and trivial election events, we forget that the war is still raging, that in every shadowy corner of the earth we are creating more enemies than we can even imagine. Our economy is crumbling, our schools are failing, our flag is unraveling.
So, again and again I ask myself the question: Where is our revolution?
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