Born in the wrong decade.

(AKA my rant for the week.)

The subject could be a parody of a fairly decent song by His Majesty The Boss, a much better parody than "Born in East LA" by Cheech and Chong. But it's true. I was born in the wrong decade.

Tonight after a few Muppet viewings I remembered that the re-aired Martin Scorsese PBS special about Bob Dylan was on tonight and tuned into that instead. While remembering how totally fucking awesome Dylan is, I also recalled the sad fact that our generation doesn't really have a cause.

I mean, there's the war, but other than cringing at the news and Daily Show every day, do we as a collective society really have any more energy to put toward fighting this? My guess, from the reactions I've seen lately, is... not really. What good has our energy to date done? None. What good will it do going forward? Not much, I'm guessing.

While driving downtown last week, I saw a street protest about the war that consisted of about 50 people walking down the street waving signs and pounding on drums. They had a cavalcade of police escorts. All I could think was, "do the downtown Oakland police really have nothing better to do than escort 50 people waving signs and chanting?" I immediately felt like an old person.

It's not that I'm against collective peaceful protests, or fighting the good fight, or anything like that. I'm just feeling a bit defeated right now. I think the Axis of Evil (or Axis of Weavels, or Axes of Weebles, or whatever the hell they're called now) has won for the moment.

On the upside (because I'm all about upsides these days) I do think that people are tired. I do think we just need a little vacation before the next ridonculous governmental mandate, and then we'll be prime for the fight.

I can't say that I don't love Masters of War, particularly Pearl Jam's remake of the song. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's a great song overall and ironically or not, it's also a great workout song. But I currently live for the day when "all the money you made will never buy back your soul" will have some impact to people who should be impacted by it.