long things

after just watching the edukators, and after reading what seems like 50,000 articles on why the "hipster" is the end of both culture and counterculture, i am annoyed when i hear the now-hackneyed phrases: THERE ARE NO YOUTH MOVEMENTS! THERE IS NO COUNTERCULTURE!

i mean, i feel it too, but i am annoyed when i hear this. and i am annoyed because they simply stop at the statement. it's not a radical statement. and it alone is not going to shock anyone into creating a movement. but being me, it's been bugging me. we are not the lost generation of apathetics. hemingway's generation claimed that title in the 1920s and the beatniks and hippies and punks and riot grrls to follow were able to live anti the establishment. and the thing that bothers me about the claim is this:

DEFINING A MOVEMENT IN THE SUPERFICIAL
when people look around and state their claim, they are looking for the fashion movement. they are looking for a movement in the cigarettes smoked and the beers drunk and the shoes bought and the clothes worn and the cars driven and the haircuts and the accessories. to look at hipsters and see in them the end of action, is to look for action in the fashion. we don't look to the prom queens and football players for action. this is because we assume you have to earn the right to wear a studded jacket or a keffiyeh. maybe in a certain code of ethics you do, but hipsters have proven to us that you really don't. and that to look for social change in a v-neck or a mohawk is fundamentally futile. and moreover, many people that i would call hipsters are the ones searching for that spirit of the counterculture and social change. they put on the spandex and the converse as if to raise the spirits of times long gone. and it takes only the thread to tell us that fashion does not = movement. in your search for the counterculture, do not look to hipsters! they dress differently does not mean they think differently! the punks hated the hippies for being apathetic and the new wavers were tired of the punks and the riot grrls hated the patriarchy-microcosm in punk ... and we look at these movements and what do we see but fashion and a few catchphrases? when long hair became the mohawk, love+peace in turn became anarchy, but do hippies and punks want fundamentally different things? NO! and when we look for the movements in fashion, it makes it that much easier to commodify our beliefs as proven, once again, by hipsters.

THE PEOPLE
this one is a lot more complicated. to have a movement, you need the people. hopefully a majority to change the status quo, but if not, then it becomes a counterculture to make visible the views of the other side. but to sit in a room and try to organize anything political, you find that activists have a twisted sense of the people. 1) how can you appeal to the people when you see them as lower than you, as idiots? there is so much segregationist thinking in making the other view the "absolute Other" so that disagreement = apathy, a lack of compassion, greediness. oh what labelling! and if it doesn't create enemies, it patronizingly creates allies: oh those poor people being kicked out of houses and how we must protect them and we create quintessential profiles for them so that they are either black, or spanish-speaking, or old, or in need of healthcare, or innocent. guilt is so powerful. we simplify to create enemies and patronize to create allies, which in turn means that the only activists (read: passionate, caring, active, selfeless, informed...) are the ones in the room - and not to digress, but even in the room we find the ISO fighting with the democrats and SDS with the ISO when they are all attempting to oppose a war - and a few select friends. because this is the way we like it! to be fighting the good fight and still be original! and this is how we fight with ourselves, we want to change things, we want social justice, but we do not want to be like everyone else. and we don't search for originality in doing original things, but in creating enemies in people all too similar to us. does it not seem ironic (and here we go with this term) to look for a people's movement by segregating? and it's hard, i know, because often, the more people involved, the more simplified the ideas have to be (marx in the communist manifesto vs. on the jewish question), and the easier they are going to be to commodify. but there is no social change without impetus in society. no social justice without the hand of the people. and we cannot go calling for people to unite! if we are going to be hostile in holding on to our originality (esp. when that originality is manifested in wearing black vs. rethinking how we can reform healthcare). it just puzzles me how we are on the brink of an environmental revolution and the "activists" i know approach it with sarcasm, saying that "recycling is primarily western" forgetting that recycling and reusing are integral parts of human history and WASTING is what is primarily western! antipathy can be equally as bad as apathy.

DEFINING A MOVEMENT IN MOVEMENT
this is a smaller issue, but i hate it most when activists want to abandon education and awareness in order to take on radical actions. radical actions would be great if they created radical change. but so much time is spent in being secretive and self-involved and righteous only to have the columbia administration ignore you. and people want radical actions so that they can feel radical. people want the adrenaline, the fire in their bones, the rip & the rush regardless. you see here that i am more critical of activists than i am of hipsters. hipsters are mere vestiges of a time when fashion was a gauge of a movement. if they achieve anything, it will be the instant knowledge in people that the person decked out in leather is not a biker with biker's beliefs. the person with a bandana and long hair is not a free-loving hippie. i can live in that world and live in it happily (and i've scanned over the damage being done by hipsters re: diminishing affordable anything). but i will not live in a world where even action does not denote movement. it's easy to look at history and see the revolution in a single action.

in 1917, a tsar was overthrown and it changed russia forever. let us overthrow george w. bush then, and the system will stay the same. i'm reading the grapes of wrath right now and this issue is brought up in the inability to go and shoot "the man" that is driving people off their farms because "the man" is greater than men, greater than a physical bank, greater than headquarters. no, the thing controlling it is not physical and cannot be fought with the physical. if they have taken it and made it theoretical and systematical and intellectual and virtual, then we must fight like with like and - sorry for this really anti-climactic conclusion, but - we must EDUCATE (and i mean educate, not raise awareness. education creates a person equipped with the mental tools to critically analyze and know what "the man" knows. raising awareness by spouting facts and statistics and horror stories is easily met with boarded-up ears).

and yes, the quiet slowness of education, the uniformity of education, the toiling confusion of education makes us feel that we are not doing anything, makes us feel like we are slaving for nothing. but without an educated people, activists are nothing but bar-stool intellectuals hierarchy-creating leaders (and solidarity with the uneducated or the poor does not remove this system!).

i end by saying, yes, let us protest, yes let us wear skinny jeans, but do not let this be the symbol of our activism. let the symbol of our activism be our activism. in other words, REMOVE THE SYMBOL! especially when symbols rely on the beholder anyway.

i think this feeling of being the lost generation, the heavy generation, the apathetic generation is all born in nostalgia for a time and a moment we cannot even understand. sold to us in books and newsreels and songs and photographs we only see the high-points concentrated. and here we are at a time when the technology before us could easily democratize and revolutionize the way we are and who calls the shots. but as we log online to download bob dylan and the clash songs, the blackberry and the iphone continue to oligopolize (word?) the internet. a shameless plug of one of my causes.

we feel lost, we feel apathetic. but let us not self-indulge ourselves. let us go out and do something and be hit in the face and not complain, but go out and do something again differently. i am not against a sense of hopelessness. i'd rather be honest and agree it exists. but i am against people pinning it with the label of THIS IS OUR GENERATION