My My My Generation

I start the day wanting to add another entry here, but I am tired of the violence. I'm thinking about how my life has been peppered with it, both personal and impersonal--including having been maced in my high school hallway when students--teens, mind you--were somehow en masse deemed dangerous. What began as a high school prank: everyone leave the building and then return promptly, was somehow suddenly "a riot". What could be the result of students doing such a thing?

Ironically, a coach/teacher--not very good at either--had passed around a cup in which he'd sprayed mace so that everyone could experience it not long before the macing in the hallway. We thought it an interesting exercise and painful although now I am not sure it was a wise decision on his part, of course, and somehow it was 'trending' and topical. I wonder now if that was his own private efforts at some crowd control and was he the 'macer'?

It wouldn't surprise me even though I can't remember much about him...his name, his subject...but I do remember his presence and how I do not have much of a visual of him probably because you would avoid eye contact with such a presence if you could anyway.

He seemed piggish. Or does to me now. Interested in being top dog as they say and interested in some notoriety among his younger charges...not the popularity of a young 'peer-like' and cool teacher, but as someone not to be messed with--more power-interested and I suppose powerless in his sad life.

Much older now, I am convinced his was a sad life. It is a feeling really more than any other kind of information. A bad feeling.

The fatigue I feel is not surprising as I think about this blog this morning. I am of the generation that watched soldiers in combat every night on the news. Body counts were daily news items like weather and sports. The images I have are soldiers in green with WWII like helmets and rifles hunched over and advancing toward something. Lots of gunfire and smoke.

This was well before my own peers would even consider the draft as something personal, but I do suppose that we expected war was a daily event. Perhaps because we were just past puberty and had entered the immortal realm of adolescence, we didn't worry about ourselves yet.

So I am tired of violence. An ironic statement. I would imagine that very few of us would not tire of violence, but I am of the generation that marked its coming of age with large and violent events. I would think that it is not much different for other generations, but I wonder how much say, of the WWII generation had these kinds of images? The soldiers surely, but as I recall, not many shared too much of that in my daily life although I was the generation to inherit those warriors' distress through dad and uncles and all their friends.

As I contemplated another blog entry this morning I found myself with so many choices I ground to a halt of fatigue. Jonestown? Heaven's Gate? Manson? Richard Speck? Kent State? Vietnam?

Those were the highlights, of course. I began to look around for more pleasant impersonal events. Those are harder yet I am sure no less interesting and if I begin to shift my vision, no less few.

But it is a difficult shift.