An Exciting Time to Be Alive

Why waste your time in a college classroom learning about the past when you could be out experiencing the present and the future?

For one thing, college is ultimately cheaper.

For two things, the present is extremely scary, and the future-- well, the human race seems to be skyrocketing off the tracks like that train in Spider-Man 2.

But really, this is probably the most exciting time to be alive since the late 60s. I used to be totally enamored with the Vietnam Era-- a time when a massive, multifaceted juggernaut of civil rights movements begun, a time when the people of America finally, after almost two hundred years of "the same," finally allowed themselves to be different and, in so doing, advanced civilization a few centuries in the short space of a few summers (you know what I'm talking about-- hippies, women's lib, gay liberation, antiwar movements). I would love the music, the fiction, the poetry, the films, oh, dear, the films (especially those amazing epic roadshow movies we're not lucky enough to have around anymore!) and I would think, Why wasn't I born then?

So that I could be born and live in this world. Those movements that started in the 60s didn't bloom and then suddenly die. Many of them still live on and are still necessary. And I'm still not sure what to make of it, but something sparked in my human imagination when it seemed like the entire Middle East turned upside down with revolution after revolution. The hippies, the women's libbers, the gay libbers, the antiwar folks, and so on still have so much to achieve, and I really have a feeling that so many exciting things are going to happen in the next ten years or so.

Our popular music is garbage now. We've lost the ability to march with dignity. And instead of being entangled in one horrid international conflict, we are now hopelessly entangled in three. Fortunately, 60s fashion died in the 70s. Fortunately, the spirit of social equality and community didn't. And while I'd give anything to inject some Sand Pebbles, some Hawaiis, some Doctor Zhivagos and some Fiddlers on Roofs into this MTV/Tarantino-inspired cinema culture, I'm really glad to be alive at this time in history.

Okay, cinema, maybe just the occasional Ryan's Daughter?

(If you don't get these movie references, feel free to look them up.)