When the Zetas Fill the Sky

This weekend:
Thursday--JYM Bayernabend

Had a family perform for us. I swear, it was right out of The Sound of Music except in German. The melodies sounded exactly the same! It was wonderful, though. This was followed by American-style stomping and shouting of popular American songs, including a rendition of "American Pie." The German family looked at us a little askance as we got in to the large circle and jumped up and down and shouted out the lyrics: "WHEN THE JESTER PERFORMED FOR THE KING AND QUEEN IN A COAT HE BORROWED FROM JAMES DEAN AND A VOICE THAT CAME FROM YOU AND ME. . . "

Saturday-Attempt to go out to Olympiapark. Am successful, but it rains on me, and I have no Regenschirm with me. Walk out in rain and try to revel in the sensation, but am wet. Decide to return to warm room.

Sunday-Glorious day at last! It's been wet and rainy and cold, and I never mind these. With weather I am mostly indifferent. I try to make my mood fit the weather rather than the other way around, and I find I am much happier. I decide to try out Olympiapark again as I want to read and journal. Go over there and climb Olympiaberg--at the top there's a luxurious field overlooking the Munich skyline and the Alps to the south. It's wonderful---cue dogs, children, women with strollers, cyclists (grrr). I find a nice little spot overlooking the southern skyline and journal and read for several hours. In a large city, especially when you don't have your own car, you never the the luxury (outside one's own room) to actually have a tiny bit of space to yourself (see earlier complaints about Hugendubel lining up the reading areas so that your elbows can be touching someone else's). So it was lovely to lay out under the sun and not have anyone in my immediate vicinity. I had an area next to the shade of a little low tree and would alternate between the two. When the sun came out, I lay out there. It was so bright I had to throw my arm over my sunglasses, but it felt sooooo good. Then I witnessed the photo above (a Suddeutsche Zeitung--that's a regional newspaper--whatchamacallit) and pondered commercialism taking over the skies and thought of the Muse lyric, "When the Zetas fill the sky . . . I'll wait, I'll wait for the sign."

Social Upheaval

I am reading The Drifters by James Michener. I picked it up at The Munich Readery which isn't far from the JYM program offices and is a large second-hand English-language bookstore. Of course, I have zero impulse control when it comes to books, those cadres of knowledge and escape. . . . So I'm still mulling over Jackson Browne and the Baby Boomer generation and I see this book about youth in the 1970s (published in 1972, I believe), a James Michener book that I had never heard of before, I had to get it. It's very, very good, and it's making me think about my parent's generation (well, not so much them--but the people about 5 to 10 years ahead of them, who came of age during, and not after, the Vietnam War) and all the upheaval they faced.



I've always been perversly interested in social revolution, especially the kind that seems to have more of internal than external force, because I'm fascinated about what fires up the boiling point for a society to collectively groan, "We have had enough, and we are breaking the system and putting something else in its place, because this isn't working." But that's much easier said than done: to shatter all social constraints is one thing, to agree upon and establish new borders is quite another. We see this especially in the Iranian Revolution, when all these ideologies and forces are waiting just outside the gates of Shah rule, and one little *flick* of the domino tips the scales heavily toward one group's favor.



So, the Baby Boomers grow up with the televised assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam, an undeclared war not-so-silently snatching a good portion of young men to be shipped off into thick jungles of the East and returning many of them back in wooden boxes, the Women's Lib movement, as women decide what role they'd like to play in society, African-Americans struggling to define a role for themselves in mainstream society, and mainstream society trying to push some room over to allow them in, man walking on the moon, Russia ever in the background, Roe v. Wade, and the new playground of drugs. . . . Heady stuff.



What impresses me the most about this generation is not the events to which they were exposed, but the collective response of the generation. It seems as if they truly did desire to break up the old order of things ("Come mothers and fathers / Throughout the land / And don't criticize / What you can't understand / Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command / Your old road is / Rapidly agin'. / Please get out of the new one / If you can't lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin'" -Dylan), leading to a "generation gap" between their values and the values of their parents' generation. Yes, many, and I say again, many of the ideas propogated were quite preposterous, but that doesn't mean the desires behind them were necessarily bad. One day someone from my child's generation will write on my generation, and yes, we have experienced quite a lot. . . but what's our response? Some argue that Generation Y seeks meaningful work and isn't seduced so much by money but by ideals. I see some of that. . . but not very much. I would say that it wouldn't be entirely out of hand to extend the "MTV Generation" name to mine: a homogenous youth culture responding mostly to consumerism--which the Baby Boomers wouldn't have stood for! One thing I do think is interesting: I would argue that race, sexual orientation, and gender makes very little difference to members of my generation. We have a, "So, Person A is (fill in the blank). So what?" attitude, which is fascinating to me that in just forty years--not even half a century--we've gone from the constrained society of my grandparents' generation to this pretty carefree society, and the Baby Boomers are that missing link.