Our New Age Made New Again

Dear George,

Without the rebellion of the Sixties, you would not be what you are today. It was the spirit of “do your own thing” that began the fragmentation of community that made it so malleable and easy to manipulate. The flower children sought a new consciousness but all they found was a drug addled incoherence that could only express itself in the screams of acid rock.

In the beginning, they were on to something as they kicked against the suffocating conformity of the fifties. Unfortunately, they forgot that freedom comes only through solidarity. Like lemmings they turned on and dropped out and in doing so prepared the way for Ronnie’s ascension and all that followed, including you.

Their dream of an Aquarian Age congealed and hardened into an age of self-gratification and greed. In the process, their ability to read and comprehend atrophied and with that their ability to reason and articulate died. Self-absorbed, functional illiterates are seldom outraged over injustice and tend to marginalize those who are. This makes you the perfect role model for the our new Age of Aquarius.

This intellectual paralysis even corrupted the critics of our modern age, the Neocons, who bewail our moral softness. Such are their reduced faculties of reasoning that the only antidote they can come up is an endless war. The naked exercise of power has replaced reason as society’s driving force. In this, the Neocons are children of the sixties in that their vision goes no further than their belly buttons. They give the outward appearance of internationalists, but their world is a paper one that has no relation to the real. They draw lines here and there on paper and convince themselves that the lines are actually changing the world while the world laughs back and detonates another IED.

In the end, the Sixties birthed a hyper consumerism that is slowly stripping the earth of her resources. Its corruption seeped into the corridors of corporate power and gave rise to a craving for undisciplined growth so intense that it is sinking the world into poverty and want, just to feed this corporate addiction.

In the end, all rebellion curdles into its opposite.

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones