A Couple of Things

Thing 1

Infinite Th0ught brings up a very good point in her post today, “death side by side with suicide .” How ironic is it that we are so disgusted with how someone can be so fanatical that they would blow themselves up, and yet we ourselves are on the verge of suicide. Whom among us is unaware of the unsustainability /suicidalness of current conspicuous consumtption habits, and yet whom among us is prepared to give any of this up? Though this is a tad over simplified, what is more egregious, some damage done by “a bunch of teenagers with bombs made of nail-polish,” or the end of living organisms?

Thing 2
I think this is the hippie-generation-in-a-nut-shell-summary I’ve been searching for. I found it here. It's a great essay, so click the link and read it.

“Fascism comes to a nation when a group of fanatical outsiders forge alliances, based on political and economic expediency, with a corrupt ruling elite -- as all the while, a fearful, distracted, denial-ridden public surrenders their liberty (then, inevitably, their souls) for the illusion of security and a few material goods. I first began to take note of the acceptance of proto-fascistic tendencies, in the cultural banalities evinced in the 1970s, even in those of us who were too young to have cast a vote for Nixon. I noticed my fellow peak-years-of-the-Baby-Boom teenagers were not the progeny of The Woodstock Nation, as the beleaguered authoritarian types of the era had feared. Instead we were the floating spirit-incarnate of a pop culture Weimar Republic. As a rule, we used drugs neither to expand our awareness nor as an act of social or political rebellion -- rather they were utilized as apolitical agents of anesthetization. Like the sound and fury of our pinball machine distractions, and our Muscle Car imperialism, and the pseudo-edginess of the so-called FM radio revolution (that was, in reality, the advent of corporate rock) -- our seeming rebelliousness was, below the lank-haired, faded denim-clad, reefer-reeking surface, a pervasive anomie ... the metastasizing of an insidious indifference -- to a large measure a radical renunciation of anything more challenging than those things available within the immediate confines of our comfort zones. It was a revelry in adolescent, pop culture narcissism, punctuated by incessant self-medication, that was mistaken for the excesses of freedom ... In short, just the sort of numbed-out, muck-headed Sturm und Drang one should expect from young minds -- bereft of life experience, brainwashed by an existence inundated by commercial manipulation, and incompetently educated by the state -- that were larded with Quaaludes and the like, for Christ's sake!”