My Generation Will Put It Right

I am 44 years old. I still feel pretty spry, excepting mornings after drinking and sudden knee-based lateral movements.

And by being 44 years old, I call on those who are around my age.

We need to be those “back in my day” people to the younger ones, no matter how out of touch we may look.

Here’s why.

The younger generations of alphabet soup (Gen Y, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, Gen Bravo, etc.) are not well versed about certain events that happened. Ask any young person who is of age of the significance of the following question:

“Can’t we all just get along?”

If this were Jeopardy!, you’d be buzzing in with “who is Rodney King?” if you were around my age.

And I feel that his contribution to American History is slowly fading into nothing. And it is complete bullshit.

Please do yourself a favor if you’re rusty on the subject matter and google him. Watch the video he was in that went “viral.” And understand why Los Angeles burned in connection to who he is.

We owe it to the younger generations to educate them on matters that are in danger of being painted with “liquid paper.” Who cares if it will be met with scorn, ridicule, hatred, or contempt. Because I remember all of it like it was yesterday, and it is still relevant.

An unarmed man was severely beaten by law enforcement, and those who beat him were found innocent in spite of video evidence, showing the first cracks of two justice systems.

I wish it never happened, but I am glad I haven’t forgotten the severity of it. Many people died as a result of the fallout. Ugliness from humans (you know how no one is exempt from having similar DNA to apes?) was on display for all to see. Our laws and the concept of “to serve and protect” were clearly absent that day, and made vast quantities of people feel like justice is gone, or at least that it would take a vacation should they ever be in a position of legal judgement. A lot of other people just looked at it as “well, maybe if he hadn’t done something to get pulled over, none of this would have happened.”

Fuck those who looked at it that way.

The gratitude lies in the fact that pop culture was quick to cement the events of this situation, so no matter how many books are burned containing this historical content, whoever does the burning will have to burn music, movies, and TV. Unlike events like the Tulsa massacre of 1921, something I never had even heard of until I was in my 30s (they didn’t teach about it at Libertyville High School).

The gratitude lies in that we can still make sure that the younger generation knows that stuff like this can happen at the drop of a hat, and that we can all act to protect those most affected. We also have the ability to frame the passage of time into bite size morsels of relevance. For example, the US civil war happened less than 100 years from the birth of our current president, someone a lot of the aforementioned generations voted for. The rejection of being able to own other human beings was still in place less than 100 years before he was born.

That wasn’t that long ago, and neither was April 29 1992. And everything appalling that happened in between, on distant shores as well as our own.

Even though we share 90+% DNA with chimpanzees, we are still capable of great things that they are not. Like ensuring that what gets eliminated in righteous school curriculums still gets taught by word of mouth to those we will yield our world to. So they don’t repeat the same fucking mistakes their predecessors made. And that is something to be fucking grateful for.