Back when I was a youngster, you know, dodging dino's on the way to the beach, there was a lot of talk about a revolution, a sexual revolution.  I think back on those days now and I chuckle. I saw a bit of service in that revolution, and you know what?  Not only did sex win, but it was like most revolutions: all it did was tear up a lot of countryside and cause an even darker repression to settle in once the fight was over.  Sad but true, those who revolt rarely have any idea what to do if they win, the fight is all they have on their minds.  A fair amount of modern culture is still swinging (no pun unless you'd like it to be) around those days, so maybe it would be a good idea to look again at those times and leave the Life magazine version sitting on the coffee table.

Best I can see that revolution actually had its roots in the weariness that came home at the end of WW2.  It began when my generation attempted to free themselves from the scars and limitations of their parents, my parent's generation, who had endured the great depression and then fought the second world war.  We grew up in the shadow and the silence of those scars, and did not understand what we saw.  

What we saw as we grew up was the tension between the genders as the men, who were in desperate need of a place to heal their wounds of the soul and salvage what remained of their days, struggled to find peace even while the women struggled to maintain their new found social freedom and empowerment… you have to remember, suffrage was not really all that old a thing in those days, the girls had good cause to fear being set back to where they had been before they'd built the weapons that won the war.

We children had no clue about any of this though, we were children.   What we saw, in our ignorance, were the featureless plastic prison bars of our parents turmoil, those layers of half defined fears and regimented traumas they, in those simpler days, simply did not have the vocabulary to discuss.   We could feel the turmoil, we could sense that the break-line ran between the genders, we saw the shell world of the conflicted beliefs that held them in bondage across a deep cultural change and in our ignorance fell prey to both our ignorance and the wicked who take profit from the confusion of others.  

It never was really about sex or free love or any of the multitude of euphemisms and catch phrases that flooded the public media, it was about the basic nature of life itself, how do any of us… male, female or Martian for that matter… go about living a life that is full and complete?   We, the children of those times, we did not, could not, see such direction in the lives of our elders for the simple fact that fate and fire had denied so many of them that very understanding.  The society around us had passed below some critical minimum of believability for those entering.

I've never heard it stated like this, so I may be way, way out in the weeds here all alone, but still and all to my thought in those days it would appear a fairly large portion of the young folk started into their lives rather feral, rather wild, starting over from the most basic of instinctual needs.  What does any wild creature really need, what does nature send us looking for?  Sustenance, security, procreation… the big three.  Well, food was in pretty abundant supply, security really didn't look to be that big a problem, what ever had torn up the lives of our parents must have had to do with procreation (for children the most shrouded, the least understood of the big three), which I'm strongly suspecting is how sex actually entered the picture in the first place.

Of course the commercial interests took note of this phenomenon, didn't bother to try and understand it, of course, just took note and began shifting their marketing strategy to accommodate the new demographic, effectively setting those confusions into the society the way you set a fence post in concrete.  Science had it's say in the run, hormone based contraception hit the market just in time to become readily available.  Technology contributed as well, the exploding phenomenon of television suddenly providing a synchronized and commercialized example, FM radio and hi-fidelity recordings brought out an entire new spectrum of musics, most of which reflected the feral children beginning their search for some direction and meaning to replace the one lost with the parent generations innocence.  All the pieces were in play to crystallize and shatter the inner structure of a society.

How do you go about procreating?  Wellll… of course.  You have sex, screw, fuck, make those minutes coupled up become the center of the world, the full focus of a life.  But there is more to it than that, as the feral children soon discovered.  It really doesn’t take two weeks to learn how to work the body of a partner into a frenzy… but it can, and far to often does, take a lifetime for people to figure out how to build the trust and acceptance between them to make that frenzy an affirmation of love and nurture rather than just enough nerve loading to blank out reality for a few minutes.  The truly sad and evil thing is when a society, as ours has, promotes the obsessive compulsion to try again and again and again for that blankness, knowing but never ever admitting that blankness is all the simple physics of the matter can produce, making it part of the culture to tell themselves that blankness is a good thing.  If you can coerce them into being blank there it’s easy to convince them to be blank to any other concept of justice, after all, they already know there is no justice for them in that place where justice, compassionate equality, is needed most of all: the interface between mates.  The revolution was over, sex won, and the land remains darkened by that first stain of war sixty years gone.

So now, now I look out at the land and I see those of my generation who fell prey to what I've described above, I see their children, my children, as they try and deal with the featureless plastic prison bars of our shell world.  I see in those children the same feral confusion as was to be seen on my generation.  I see those children impacted by the same growth curves of science and technology, the internet taking over point for the passé realms of television, cell phones and wireless extending everywhere, privacy become almost taboo these days.   And that, that tendency to consider true privacy a taboo, a rudeness, that has in these last few weeks started a most unsettling thought for me.

Three primal instincts… sustenance, security, procreation.  The folks my age, a bit older, a bit younger, when we abandoned the shell world of our parents we looked first to the last of the three, procreation… and the result was the so called Sexual Revolution.  But our children, our children can see the answer isn't to be found in matters sexual, and so I fear they have moved one instinct over.  And folks, if the instinct for security becomes as overdriven as was the instinct for procreation the outlook is ugly, grim ugly… before that has run a course comparable to the run of the sexual revolution we'll see the blackest tyranny ever known to mankind being sustained and supported by technology.  After all, there really is nowhere safer, more secure, than solitary confinement in a maximum security prison.  Do you hear me, oh gossip master of the cell phone calling circuit?  Do you hear me, oh masters of the World of Warcraft?  Am I making enough sense for you to stop, and really see the world you are creating now, in the days of your ignorance, the world you and all of humanity will have to live in as you pass into your maturity?  Do you hear me?  Do You?