In case "What's this world coming to?" was not rhetorical.

“Let us not listen to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair.”

----Albert Camus, “The Almond Trees”

                I had a spectacular 2011, and I feel just awful about it.
                Based on a lot of the year-in-reviews I’ve read over the past couple months, nobody appears to have thought much of 2011 as a year overall. Let’s have a quick run-down of the awful (and you’ll sadly note I may miss something): Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear crisis; Norwegian massacre; African famine; Belgian shooting; Slave Lake fire; Philippines earthquake; Arizona shooting; Texas Christmas Day murder/suicide. Oh, and then there are the matters of opinion: Harper majority; criticisms of Occupy Movement; Middle East uprisings (the continually un-aptly titled “Arab Spring”).

                I found it to be a hard year as well, despite the personal highlights. Norway and Japan hit me especially hard because there are people in my life who were in those places. I had a cousin on the island of Utøya. It was hard to wake up one morning last May and face four to five years of my country in the clutches of capitalism-trumps-all conservatism.

                I’d like to answer to the cynics, to the idea that things are constantly getting worse. (If you’re a frequent visitor to my blog, consider this a sequel to a piece I blogged last August: http://vikingpaul.blogspot.com/2011_08_01_archive.html)

                Declaration: The world is not becoming worse. The apocalypse does not at last looming on the horizon. (Sorry to the gun/canned-food hoarders out there). 

                Bad things have always happened, natural or man-done. 2011 had a bucketload of crap in it, no doubt, but I would caution those who despair from throwing in the towel on the human race or on this planet. Give up fighting and you quite simply lose. That’s it, easy Math.

                It is nothing but stupid to look at the past as civilized and the present as a time where hell is busting at its bindings. Murder has always been there. Senseless massacres have always been there. Natural disasters made the planet what it is. (Hello Gulf of Mexico, g'bye dinosaurs). Teenagers are no more selfish and no more disrespectful now than they were 1000 years ago, they’re simply disrespectful in new ways. How they rebel is always different than how the generations preceding perceive as proper. It would meet with a little more approval if it was traditional rebellion. Yeah, if that ain’t an oxymoron . . .The world is not getting worse, it’s just different than it once was.

                A sign of aging, of course. Every generation that has ever aged has stared down its inheritors and at least once declared that the world is troubled/doomed/fucked. Yet we still manage to plod on.

                Most of my news comes to me via radio or the Web. In both cases, stories often end with invitations for public response. On the radio, a selected group of choice responses are played; online, the right story can draw hundreds of comments, with new argument threads being drawn that have little pertaining to the original news item, appealing to our Facebook-inspired need to debate EVERYTHING through comments, with only the harshest or most vile deleted by a mediator. If you pay close attention to the responses—and it becomes exponentially more true the more horrifying the news piece was (and let’s face it, most of the news that gets our attention IS the bad stuff)—you’ll see that most of them decry the shoddy state of our planet and society, and that things are just going to continue to get worse.

                Media pieces, Facebook stati, tweets . . . all variously worded versions of “What’s this world coming to?” Hell, I didn’t tell my own wife about the Christmas murders in Texas when I first heard about them because I know she is sometimes given to worrying about what kind of a world we are raising our children in.

                I won’t say I’m not prone to a little worrying about the future myself. I’m tempted to despair when I consider the state of our environment, and our apathy towards it, when I look at idiotic New-Thing-Now capitalism, or when I look at those who define their entire lives around the acquisition of wealth. I try to allow it to only be a fleeting despair by doing something to make my corner better. That's the key for me. 

                Those who are aware of the state of our world yet do not give over to despair, and yet are not hopeful or productive in enacting change—indeed they intentionally stand in the way of change—have avowed to attack idealism wherever they see it. They claim the maturity of “realism” (as opposed to cynicism), but what it thinly hides is a justification for being greedy, lazy and immoral. It’s been a trend in the 21^st Century. Idealism, hope, and proactive change have all existed before now, but what I find singularly disturbing is the habit to treat them as childish things. (I.E. “If you’re under thirty and you vote Conservative, you’re heartless. If you’re over thirty and you don’t, you’re an idiot”). The wise stand aside and shake heads full of wisdom and old salts about life requiring a helmet and all that rot, while stroking an icon of Kevin O’Leary. This isn’t the worst, though. The worst is the desire to attack idealism, to decide that, for some reason, the current youth have no right to rebel, to protest, to believe they can make change. The war between idealism and greed has been fought before, but because the Boomers and the Xs didn’t win their battles, it’s as if the Millennials are to accept that the war is over, lost, and they’re that last bastion of soldiers living at the top of a mountain awaiting orders, unaware that their side surrendered years ago. The youth are being told they shouldn’t be optimistic, they shouldn’t hope, they shouldn’t protest, they shouldn’t Occupy anything. That’s just not mature.

                Because worrying, we know, is like a rocking chair. It seems that there are three types of people in this present future, or future present: those that figure we’ve made it this far, may as well go on consuming, spending, polluting, watching Entertainment Tonight. There are those who see the bad in the world, despair, and then bury their heads in the sand. I try to be the third type: aware, so cautious. Active, so hopeful. Not self-satisfied--understanding that one man can only do so much, but that this should not prevent me from doing it. Those who are not willing to let despair stand in the way of being the change they want to see in the world.

                Can one man have a dramatic effect? Many have always seen naiveté as my great flaw, but I do believe that one man can be a stone dropped into a still pool. Better to happily do, than to despair and do nothing, or to deny and destroy.

“If you look out at the city you live in and see that it’s full of garbage you should whistle a happy tune like a character in a Disney cartoon and start collecting the garbage.”

----Pete Townshend

Kids These Days . . .

     I was at a family wedding just a couple of years ago. An older cousin--once a notorious hellraiser and womanizer--cornered me. Over the past few years, he had found Jesus, married a woman half his age, fathered seven children on her, and closeted himself and his family from society. I'd idolized him when I was young, but I hadn't seen him in years, hadn't spoken to him since his conversion and the end of my childhood..
     Small talk. He asked me how I liked being a teacher.
     Fine, fine.
     "Don't you find that kids these days are worse than ever?"
     Pause. Do you forget how you were?
     Avoidance. "They have no respect. They don't care about anyone but themselves."
     I repeat my question in my head. Also, in my head: The same could be said for many of the faithful.
     "Don't you think they're just terrible?"
     No, I don't think that at all.

     It's been a long year so far, folks. Wildfires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorism, partisan fingerpointing, racial/religious/political shootings. .
     Maybe it's because I have former students in Japan, a friend in New Zealand, family in Norway, and maybe it's because I'm staunchly anti-Harper, hell, maybe it's because I hate the Boston Bruins . . . but, big scale-wise, I don't have a lot of good to say about the first seven months of 2011.
     Whenever there's tragedy, whenever there's an issue, somebody always takes a moment to gauge and to judge the reaction of the youth, or to stereotype the whole based on the few, and then to say: "What's this world coming to? These kids . . ."

     If you've read my blog before, you've read my decrying the folly of today's youth on occasion. Usually, I'm expressing my disgust at someone having to text me from five feet away. However, I've never claimed (or felt) that kids are getting worse every year, or that their follies and choices are responsible for the sorry state of our world. I blame the state of the world on oil, greed, most organized religions, and good old-fashioned selfishness. Oh, and reality TV.
     Despite my dissatisfaction with a lot of 2011, I am not one of those fellas that thinks the world is getting shittier each year we step into the 21st century. Sorry, I saw the Cold War and the Mulroney administration. I saw Poison considered a credible band and Steve Gutenberg a credible actor. There have been worse days.

     Grandpa. You have a Grade 6 education. You didn't have your first pair of shoes until you were twelve. You got up at 5 am every day and worked yourself to arthritis. Your wife you kept at home, then left her for months on end so you could go work, and the most you had to do with your children was to lay into them with a belt. You came of age when every orator worth his salt was becoming a dictator, and you killed people in the most horrible conflict in human history. You smoked, you drank, you swore, you slapped around your wife and kids. You went to church every Sunday and sang in the choir.

    Dad. You were raised by heavy-handed parents who neglected your emotions, worked you like a slave, denied you an education, and expected you to follow in their footsteps. You never expressed an emotion beyond rage until you were thirty. You defined yourself by what you saw on TV and there was never enough for you to watch. Still isn't.You and your friends took so many drugs you still have flashbacks and you speak with a slight lisp. You protested the corruption of the Man, and in less than twenty years you were exploiting every corner of the world for your own wealth. You have expanded our dependencies on oil and energy and your only church is the bank.

     Me. You grew up being told that your feelings mattered, that you should express them, all the while whining that you needed that one extra action figure for total nirvana. You saw a world turn to suit you, a world where all that mattered was your entertainment, and the vehemency with which you demanded to be entertained. As a teenager, you moped in a depression because you just had so much. Needed to be mad about something. You became the first real user of the Internet, the most exciting tool for containing all accumulated knowledge  in human history. You promptly dedicated 99% of it to games and pornography.

     Kids these days.
     Kids these days have the chance to overthrow the patriarchal madnesses: capitalism, militarism, fundamentalism and selfishness.
     Kids these days. They don't know how good they've got it. The world has been rotten before, people have been rotten before. Kids before these ones were selfish troublemakers mired in the demands of their id. Superiority comes with the guilt of failure.
     Kids these days have the world we've handed them. I don't envy them, but then I think they have more potential to stop the madness than most of the generations before them. If they stop listening to our quibbling and criticism, and if they care enough to unfuck the world on their own terms, for the future rather than for the past, well, then the future may be okay.

     Kids these days don't owe us a thing, save accepting our apology.