We are a brawling, righteous, pompous, ignorant people, a land of blowhards to the right and left. Our warlike impulses and warlike pride are dangerously coupled with our insufferable vanity, our permanent immaturity, our lives of fear and pleasure. The very land we stand on was taken from someone else and made profitable by people who did not own themselves. There’s a mass shooting and we have a phony little debate over gun control, but no one on the right or the left talks about suicide by gun. We are violently disposed to others and we are just as violently disposed to ourselves. But I read crime is on the decline. Something about leaded gas. Maybe we have not been so bad after all, maybe the greatest generation was simply poisoned by itself.
But the young people still decide to bring babies into this mess of a world. It’s because the young people keep faith with humanity. It’s the young people who believe in the better future. It’s the young people who have yet to lose their minds, their imaginations, their wonder, their intent to give life rather than take it.
”-
Robert Olmstead, War and Baked Beans
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/135507303807
