Mickies Dog Food for Thought

The Dog had breakfast with another old "dog" this morning, in an old diner with memories and scars going back a long time. It has been the home to a lot of radical people and thoughts over the years.

Among our ponderings were some questions for everyone in our generation:

When did we become the people our parents warned us about?

When did the radicals of the '60s become the pseudo intellectuals of today?

When did we stop being passionate about our world and stop trying to fix it?

When did we give up the revolution and actually buy into the idea of political process?

When did we become wimps?

The Dog's generation felt real frustration with politics "as usual" and were hell bent to change the world. We were surrounded by corrupt politicians and government at almost every level. We were being "regulated" on everything we did and paid taxes for things we didn't want. We were fighting a pointless war in a land we couldn't understand. Corporate pigs exploited people and resources like they were both expendable...and laughed in the face of anyone who challenged them.

Sound familiar? My reference is 1968, what's yours?

A big difference between then and now is that we did more than write about it on blogs. We didn't suffer the passive aggressive convenience of the Internet and blackberry politics. We took physical action and challenged on an in-your-face strategy. We may have been a little extreme, at times, but we fought a good fight and were not afraid to stand up for what we believed in. We weren't afraid of getting dirty. Chicago in 1968 was a whole lot different than it was in 2008.

I miss those days.

What happened?

Some of us gave up the idea that we could change the world. Some of us felt we could only change the way we dealt with it. Our passions were subverted by our material success. We settled on the idea of singing kumbaya around the campfire with a good income to pay for the firewood...was being what we wanted.

We told ourselves that we would take "revolution" underground and change things from the inside out. Unfortunately, I think that strategy overwhelmed a lot of us and compromised a lot of others. The mantra changed from "Revolution" to "Money is nice to have".
We became the people we used to despise.

We became hard charging to make a better life for ourselves and our future generations. We blasted forward to create technologies and opportunities for an easier way of life, without fully considering how those things would affect people who never had to struggle for them.

We became the people we used to despise.

The problem is that our generation created a lot of entitlements, enablements (my new word), and other collateral damage that set the stage to lose touch with the realities of life -- and living. We never expected anyone to learn from what we did -- or what they were doing.

We did not honor the past for what it did accomplish... until it was too late. We forgot a lot of what we believed. Worst of all, we actually believed our own "press" about our accomplishments.

We traded our passion for big houses, nice cars, and giving our kids "things we never had".

We are now in a world having to deal with that.

Speaking for my generation, I am sorry. I am truly sorry for the mess our generation is leaving for our children to live down.

What we realized at Mickies was that a lot of us are now rethinking the past 40 years and looking to bag it all, grow what's left our hair back into ponytails, and head for hills and a simpler way of life. We don't want to burden our kids, our society, our anything. We just want to live again, because we forgot how to do that while we were changing things.
I hope the future generations take the time to read up on what we did. Ask us about it while we can still remember it. And, try, please try, to learn from our mistakes.

Places like Mickies still crank out the platters and the milk shakes. The ghosts of past dogs live on. I hope somebody hears them.