Missing: The Voice of Democratic America

You know, for all that the people of the US are supposedly not respresented by their government, for as liberal and open-minded as they're supposed to be, I see a whole lot of things being DONE by the close-minded bigots of the country.

The Republicans and the religious right write articles, make waves, have time to publicly debate whether or not black people are allowed to sneeze in public or how many fifths of a person we're counting gay people as this week.

Where's the Democratic American outcry? I'm really not hearing it, and I've got my ear to the ground, or the wall, or wherever else one's supposed to put it. Apart from Michael Moore and Al Gore, who's making films with enough buzz to go public? Where are the protests and demonstrations in the streets? Where is the evidence that the majority of Democratic America is doing something other than playing Playstation and getting by with the status quo, just like everyone else?

Not long ago, it was near impossible to make your way across a college town without encounting a group of people actively protesting something. Groups like Amnesty International, Sierra Club and the Green Party had strong footholds among college students and progressive individuals all over, and there was never a shortage of ways for teenagers and young adults to get involved. What's become of those days? Why are today's active youth so... inactive?

For the most part, the world-changing Gen Xers are out of university now and have moved on to the world of business and pursuit of creative endeavors. They're busy trying to refine the corporate world and hold big business responsible; the social activists of yesteryear now wear suits and ties with sneakers and try to deal with the everyday nuisances of being grown-up while affecting world change.

When we were younger, still in our late teens and early 20s, we opposed injustice in its theoretical form. Don't do these things, we'd say, because they're just not right. It's not right to pass people over for jobs because of race or sexual orientation or age. It's not right to pollute the environment, test on animals, refuse women the right to care for their own bodies. It's not right to leave social programs terribly unfunded when the victims are children and the defenseless. Life was so terribly clear-cut in the theoretical, and any sociologist can tell you that Generation X is all about the theoretical.

Now we go to work at jobs that we're likely not thrilled with, and we feel like we're compromising. Moreover, we face all those theoretical slights on a daily basis, and we're only human. There's only so much that we can do with the time and energy that we're given, and so often daily life can feel like triage, as we spend our time consoling friends. Forgiving the world, you see, for its myriad misdeeds can take so much out of us, and we are all of us grieving for something. We have so much grief, it seems, that it overpowers us, and our voices become silence. Let me clarify.

We have tacit, tactile grief, to the very last of our ranks. We have the kind of grief that wails and throws things and rebels against the unfairness of the world when we are buried in the deepest recesses of our solitude, grief memorialized in t-shirts, music selections, food choices, accessories when we are out among the world.

Love, to us, in a lot of ways simply means taking upon oneself another's grief. We don't argue when someone chooses "Goodbye Blue Skies" on the jukebox at lunch for the 47th time this month, we understand that fashion suspends for the blue sneakers held together with duct tape, worn in memoriam for a slain comrade. We don't push for details or speeded healing when someone's eyes glaze over at the mention of The Princess Bride. We just accept that for us, it is and has always been easier to force our sorrows upon pop culture and by entangling art in its many forms with the distasteful memory of heroin overdoses, shouting parents, sexual assaults, and in villifying the association, we can forgive the world. The biggest problem that anyone in our generation faces lies in the daily struggle to do just that: to forgive the world.

What was once anger and indignation has turned inwards, it seems. The loudest voices of our generation are tired of fighting; our writers flee to other countries, as do our poets, musicians, artists. We ask one another the point of continuing to fight, and over coffee and in speeding cars and looking over the top of out cubicles, we concede, one by one, that there is no point.

This is the cruelest blow; the other guy's winning, and we roll over to let it happen. It is rumored that the great Aztec leader Moctezuma II, upon seeing that the Spaniards wished his people ill and that war was forthcoming, asserted his certainty that his people would win, stating something along the lines of, "At least we have the numbers." Is this history repeating itself? Is Democratic America, which has the numbers to triumph over anyone who dares to take their liberties, overconfident and unaware of the tactics of its opponent?