Published on: Wednesday, July 28, 2010

By Brian J. Karem

As a wiser man than I once said, those who forget the history are condemned to repeat it.

Okay, we’re officially reliving history.

I believe the evidence shows we are currently reliving the oppressive 1950s without the diversion and joy of Buddy Holly and other rock musicians of that era.

We live in repressive times where we can’t say certain words, or think certain thoughts without being labeled a racist or worse.

Political correctness and fear of terrorism have combined to stifle all creative though or outside of the box political thinking.

Our economy stinks, we’re embroiled in not one, but two wars, popular music sucks, and the government, from the federal down to the most local incarnation is run by a bunch of people who in many cases as kids were the people last picked on their grade school kickball team.

The government’s media relations people, from the police to the president are filled with people who sacrifice our liberties for the perceived coziness of security, and give credence to the aphorism by Ben Franklin which states that those who wish to sacrifice a little liberty for a little safety deserve neither.

The public has never had a greater need to know what is going on in government and elsewhere, and I have never lived in a more repressive environment for getting what the public has a right to know.

But instead of blaming those who keep us from the information and those who conspire to control events to protect themselves, I will instead invoke Pogo’s saying once again, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I take no joy in this. But, I utter it freely: The problem with the world today is the Baby Boomer generation – my generation.

The Who may have been talking about our generation when they sang, but things we do today seem awful cold, and calculated and smack of the selling of our soul.

Apathy reins in the world today. We don’t question, we don’t fight. We endure – even the wrongs that we know are perpetrated against us because we don’t wish to make waves, or upset. We just want to get by, pay our bills and lead a life of cocooned safety away from the evils of the world and devoid of any confrontations.

Confrontations take energy, and apparently we spent it all in our youth protesting Vietnam, Richard Nixon and Kent State or smoked it all away in a purple haze at Woodstock.

However, the world didn’t end in the 60s or the 70s and we all grew up and sold out to Wall Street, and became junior yuppies in the age of Ronald Reagan egocentrism.

Me. Me. Me. It became all about me.

We grew into the very thing we didn’t like about our parents, only we didn’t have to suffer through the Great Depression, nor World War II to become like our parents. We grew up fat, content and by and large in a happy, bourgeois world of Rock N’ Roll and excess.

In the process we thought we needed more and more.In an effort to keep up with our neighbors we strove for more and more visible signs of success – quite the opposite of the soulful preaching of our youth.

“Give Peace a Chance” became “Gimme all your money,” or “I can’t drive 55” and the thrill of political activism of the civil rights era and the belief that we could make change for the better possible mutated into a cancerous form of politics bereft of soul, but long on spin control.

Now I sit here a hopefully wiser, yet still concerned young man in a more mature body, wishing John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” and the screams of justice of Martin Luther King were still in place.

Look around people. Our county government doesn’t know what the County Executive can legally do. Jewish Synagogues are desecrated by those who have not a clue as to how they can give peace a chance, much less do they care.

Have we learned nothing since the 60s? Remembering that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it, I fear that Instant Karma will get us.

Where are the Martin Luther Kings and the John Lennons when we truly need them?

Don’t look to my generation. We’re spent and have forgotten our roots.

Look to my sons’ generation – if we can get them off the Xbox long enough to become conscious.