We should all be mad as hell and not take it anymore
In the 1950s there were the angry young men.
Angry Young Men is a journalistic catchphrase applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950s. The phrase was originally used by British newspapers after the success of the play Look Back in Anger to describe young British writers, though it was derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose “Angry Young Man” was published in 1951.
It has been used more generically, to refer to a young person who strongly criticizes political and social institutions.(Wikipedia)
In the 60s we had the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the Yippies and the Weathermen. There were a lot of angry young men, and women. Angry at the Nixon White House, angry about the war in Vietnam, angry about the apparent decline of Western society. I was one of them, a campus leftist radical who sometimes felt the only way change would ever come about was to (figuratively) burn the whole rotten edifice to the ground and rebuild it in the spirit of the founding fathers.
Where are the angry young men today?
In the 40 years since I’ve become quite disillusioned and have found my radicalism to largely be a wasted effort. Obviously America was not ready to change its ways. We needed war to stimulate the economy and keep the military/industrial complex rich and powerful. We didn’t seem to be able to elect a decent president. Americans eschewed the voting booth in favor of daytime soap operas. Americans had become placated, mindless, unquestioning sheep, afraid to challenge the government and unwilling to risk their comfortable lifestyles.
The only favor done to this country by Bush and the fundamental religious-right has been to reignite the radicalism many of us have been repressing for four decades. After eight years of what I can only characterize as the worst presidency of the 20th century people are beginning to wake up to the failure of the American dream.
Ordinary Americans have lost their jobs, their homes and their hope. Their children may not be attending college. They can longer afford to retire. All they’ve worked for, all their goals, have been reduced to ash by greedy shysters and corrupt businessmen. They watch their tax dollars being used to bail out inefficient companies led by unscrupulous charlatans while their small businesses fail and their taxes rise. Americans are becoming mad as hell, and well they should be. They’ve only now woken up to the fact that they’ve been played as suckers. They’ve been stuck with the bill for a party they didn’t even attend.
These conditions incite radicalism. When people have been beaten down as far as they can be, they finally begin to resist, to ask the questions they should have been asking 40 years ago. They start to oppose “business as usual”, they refuse to accept the life handed to them by those who posses the wealth and the power, the same people responsible for their plight. When the shit hits the fan, and there’s no end of shit in sight, at least turn off the fan. People are beginning to demand that we turn off the fan. Then we can start to reduce the pile of shit.
A common radical expression was “Power to the People”. Folks dismissed the idea as too radical for the 60s. Maybe they’ve finally come to understand what we were saying and to agree with those sentiments. We need to reclaim our power as citizens. We need to be reminded that we are the government, we own the government, they work for us. We are the United States of America. We say where the country is headed, we determine the priorities. We expect demand that our representatives actually represent our needs. We didn’t hire them to do what they want but what we want. The Supreme Court’s there to make sure we don’t want something contrary to the Constitution and that’s a good thing. If we subvert the Constitution we deserve to lose our country.
So to all you wealthy preachers preying on those who trust you, to all you bankers and mortgage investors who lent money in bad faith to those most desperately trying to live the dream, to all you auto company executives too stupid to drive the cars you manufacture to a meeting where you beg for our money so you can keep doing the crappy job you’ve been doing while getting filthy rich, instead choosing to fly in your private jets as a further slap in the face of your customers and investors; FUCK YOU.
We need to become radical again. We need radical ideas, radical approaches to the problems we face. We need to face the fact that we cannot go back. The old ways no longer work. The rest of the world has changed. We must adapt or we will perish.
My philosophical hero, Henry Rollins, America Under Attack: