Youth speaks

A whole long weekend and neither dawg has anything to say?  Lately I have begun to fear for the future of the Institute, and mostly this morning I wonder what am I to say.  Am I supposed to disagree with myself?

I suppose I should be heartened by the Saturday marches,  Look at that turnout, look at those young earnest faces.  Oh they are so determined to do the right thing, they are speaking out boldly,  Back in the day I remember Life Magazine speaking glowingly of the anti war movement.  We were young and earnest then, and now we are old and cynical.  That is not so bad, cynicism comes with age, it is really well, wisdom, it is the realization that everything is complicated.  

There is a certain strain of cynicism that I want to withhold the mantle of wisdom from, and that is that bitter "they're all a bunch of crooks," variety.  You know where they start out young and idealistic and then something bad happens to them and they are so dismayed to find that other people are not pure like them that they decide everybody is a crook and a liar, like the world is too dirty for the likes of them.  This is not the cynicism that is wisdom, life is more complicated than that. 

But there are those of us who feel a little uneasy about our cynicism, who long for the idealism of our youth and when we see the young and earnest marching our hearts sing and we think the youth are our conscience and see hope in that and think maybe a little kid should lead us.  Not me.  Meet the new kids, the same as the old kids.  Remember when we were kids?  Remember how stupid we were?   Case closed.

The message of the marches is a bit scattershot, but I think it is basically gun control. not prying rifles from old coot's hands, more like banning semis and autos and making it a little harder to prove you are a law abiding person before you can buy a gun. I think they are reasonable demands, but people of Beagles' ilk think they are one step closer to getting at Old Betsy, so they will probably never happen.

Well maybe, we'll see how the issue plays in the 2018 elections.  If a few gun nut candidates fall we may get reasonable demands.  In any case I expect it will be good for the dems, who are not all crooks and bad for the reps who are also not all crooks, though more of them probably than the dems, but that is just my opinion.  Maybe that's cynical, but I am young and earnest no longer.

I was a little disappointed in the Stormy interview.  Not much of a circus.  More of a bust.  Pun intended.