Thursday, November 30, 2017

Culture Convulsion

Every few years there’s a
shudder that runs down
society’s spine.  A tingling
numbness that infiltrates
the culture, waiting below the
surface.  

With each generation that
comes of age, they discover
the new outrage that their
parents never even considered
to be something to be concerned
about.

This new outrage bends the
reeds of previously accepted
normalcy to the breaking point,
until they snap with all the fury
of a bomb, obliterating the reeds
beyond recognition.

The slo-mo outrage explosion ripples across
the social landscape, uprooting
convention and perceptions of
acceptability, tossing every belief into
the air like so many twigs on the
breeze.  

“We didn’t know,” scream the old guard,
as they pinwheel through the mushroom
cloud of outrage.  Bonking their bodies
against the rubble and debris swirling around
them. “We didn’t know, we didn’t know,” they
cry.

“You should have,” shouts the youthful cloud,
 “you should have!”  Their rage in a roiling
boil over the perceptions of past generations,
“You should have known!” They howl as they
beat their breasts and chant for change.
“Your old ways are done!”

The old guard retreat into clumps as they
fall from the sky, blankly looking at each other,
mystified by what just happened.
They thought they were doing so well.
They thought they were doing such good.
They thought it was under control.

The old, older guard, stand on their porches,
and point with their canes, “See, see…,”
they cajole, “we told you it would happen to you,
damn hippies.”
The deposed wipe their noses,
bloodied,  but still they think they’re in
the fight.

They don’t know it but their generational
bubble has burst. It’s over, ended and
joined the choir invisible, to be footnoted
by future historians who’ll remark,
“Unbelievably, people once acted this
way, much to the chagrin of our current
social morays.”

There’s no change like the change that
makes change. Except its very changing changes
how that change will be changed.
I just convulsed a little.  

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