Jail & My Generation

I went to see a play called Jail last night, put on by Runaways Lab Theatre. They run to the experimental, and this was a sort of experiential play about Jail, the first 15 minutes of which consisted of our protagonist wordlessly pacing and fidgeting in his space of confinement, which was indicated by tape on the floor.

It's a new piece, but it took me back to the 1960s, I have to say. As did that Bernie Sanders ad the other day, the one featuring the Simon and Garfunkel song about looking for America.

I thought about my "generation" of Americans, which is not really all that homogeneous, but which is lumped together so readily as the Baby Boom. Somehow the term usually seems to be applied to the upper middle class, college-educated portion of that group.

We did better than I feared we would, when I was in college, when people around me seemed so intoxicated with Marcusian ideology. That ideology has not gone away, by any means. It has its strongholds, particularly in the colleges. But my fellow boomers themselves outgrew it for the most part.

There's a theory that people acquire their philosophical outlooks in college, and never review them, but I don't think that's so. I think people reflect continuously on what is right and just. That's where the stereotype of the wizened wise person comes from. You may come out of college thinking that profit-making is evil, but some years spent in a profit-making enterprise often serve as an education in a contrary point of view.

People don't lock down Truth
in the days of their youth.