Get Together

Everyone is so angry nowadays, from people walking, heads down with scowling faces. Driving, a symbol of freedom and the open road. Now a challenge, remarkably no patience or enjoyment belongs to cruising. Even our music is angry, joyless, despondent, where are those hippies, the children with flowers in their hair; the youth that came together to love one another. It is strange, because the hippies are holding power, but they neglected, disregarded, the bygone tenets of their ideals. That of beauty, colors, loving, smiling faces, shining light on each other, all faded long ago, forgotten in this present-day resentment towards each other at every turn and topic.

The vexation wells up inside of me, reminiscing of a defunct, now extinct generational era, that I was unable to experience. What happens in the transitional phase of young people entering adulthood, carrying on to middle age? How did it all go so wrong? Why were they not effective in advancing the idea, instilling their children with peace, love and understanding? Was it all just bitterness, at the handling of that generation's feelings?

Standing at a juncture looking into the past, I feel a tremendous sense of loss. Our future as a society creates feelings of trepidation, uneasiness with many misgivings. Bringing people back together seems unimaginable, especially in this tense, uneasy, and very inflammatory environment. Created from some great divide, drawn down party lines of a perverse association with one side or the other. The simplest disagreement between individuals becomes catastrophic. Total annihilation, disaster, and ruin for society and America as we know it, that is how the masses look at any variance or differing opinions in their hardline beliefs. No room for compromise, no room for contrasting views.

With this in mind, how are we able to get together, and smile on our brothers? Where is that new vibration that swept the nation in 1967? How do we get that sentiment back? There is no going backwards, how do we bring it back going forwards? How and where do we go from here if we lose reverence for those ideas of peace, love and true liberty, where do we go? Most importantly, who will lead us?

Living in Michigan’s third largest city, the city of Warren I have minimal expectations of the direction politics keep moving. In this city I’m watching the current mayor Jim Fouts struggle with losing his grip on power. Like a fascist dictator, grasping, embarrassingly to overthrow his own city’s law on term limits. As he slinks away defeated, the names that sweep in are names of recognition, with a multitude of years of failed policies. They have entrenched themselves as career politicians. The absolute ineffectual, lamentable, arrogant and incompetent narcissists ever created and unleashed on earth.

We cheer them on, like some bloodthirsty plebeians calling for victory for a gladiator who is just a brutal murderer. But the only killings these victors boast is our freedom and individual rights. They pit one foolish group of voters against another. None of them are able to recognize or appreciate that these masters of manipulation duped them into thinking their brother is the enemy. Each side triggered their democracy or their republic is being destroyed, yet keep the two party system in power. Left or right, they keep rising up, while the American citizen keeps sinking down. Stop pointing fingers over there and look into the mirror right here.