I always loved that song. It has been with me most of my life. I added the word fast because of my perspective not because of facts or things like that. We are bombarded with facts and figures and they make my head swim. Some years ago the idea of information overload was being discussed and that even seems old now. For those of you who do not know me I am just passed my 76th birthday and still active in my field as well as in political activism. Why I feel the changes now is mainly personal. During the sixties I was a faculty adviser for SDS and a leader anti-war movement in the Buffalo, N.Y. while on the faculty of SUNY at Buffalo. My life as a University Professor kept me in close contact with young people. Now I live in a hot bed of extreme right wing "culture" in a county that does not even have one stop light. The local high school has been basically taken over by the Churches and I am 75 miles from my University and don't get there very often. Even when there, having been at Buffalo and Harvard during the movement days the atmosphere was a change for me. I am encouraged by things I am reading about youth here and in Canada and Europe. Read on below and I will talk about how different it seems this time.
First of all the future is different for young people now. Certainly it has changed from when I was young for if I were growing up now I never could hope to receive the education I did. One of the spin-offs of the Cold War was the boom in funding for education due to Sputnik. The plutocrats were not only willing to invest in the education of working class egg heads like me but were looking for us to save their butts. Now they have no similar threats (Iran will not ever cause a reaction like Sputnik did). Education itself has changed drastically as the way the plutocrats extract wealth from the people has changed. Reductionist technology and its use as a new form of magic now dominate the scene. It serves a multitude of purposes including keeping people spending and keeping them entertained as well. In spite of this there seems to be deep seated restlessness due to the growing awareness that no one is really "needed" in a global economy. If you get into the circles that are integral to the plutocracy you can score big. The recent banking fiascoes are just more evidence that there are no longer any real rules that can be broken. You can fail big time and someone will rape the public for you to bail you out.
The young people are seeing the emperor in his nakedness and he is rather ugly! The idea of National defense is slowly being exposed as welfare for a select group and technological means for dominating one's own people. The purpose of Nation States is evolving into the way of diving up the regions of population control responsibility to make the plutocracy secure. Over that are "intelligence" organizations whose global identity resembles the kind of mumbo-jumbo the right wing assigns to the UN.
As I write this I wonder about how it will be perceived. I'd love to be back in one of those all night long SDS meetings and when asked to speak my mind say these things and have the young people shoot back at me. I was over 30 then and not to be trusted. one of the greatest honors of my life was the fact that I was not only trusted but allowed to be one of the group.
So I sit here in a kind of self made exile looking at things here and elsewhere on the internet. In those days It all came out in the Underground Press. I have conflicting thoughts about where we are now. The internet seems to have brought us a long way forward. Yet I am worried by the self re-enforcing stuff that somehow portrays the world as being run by the likes of Romney. We already went through the George W. Bush puppet show. Did we learn nothing? Why is the Wizard able to remain concealed behind the curtain. Do the people in the streets and the people protesting see him more clearly? I suspect they do. But I am cut off from them. I wish I were out there myself. I have trouble walking to the mailbox so I won't be out in the streets. Too far from a urinal. I am watching and hoping. I do know that things are different this time. This may be our last chance.