Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Not So Great Expectations

Sometimes I get to feeling like the current generation is headed off in life the way Pip from Dickens' Great Expectations started.  At least politically, anyway.  In that novel,  Pip told us he carried his last name on the authority of his father's tombstone, and the word of a sister.  Which is another way of saying his mother and father were gone before he was old enough to learn even the family name from them.

When I think of the sense of surrender and hopelessness and despair and cynicism, not to mention near masochistic condescension regarding the efficacy of political grassroots effort and mass protest which characterizes so many young people today, I realize none of them were around the last time this attitude was exposed as just as fraudulent as the oppression which engenders it.  And so, many have accepted a life of not so great expectations.  The irony is this is precisely the opposite of the lies their oppressors constantly spread about their supposed self-indulgence and claim of entitlement. 

I think it's time to kick the liars in the teeth again, don't you?

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