The old freaks
Sometimes, when I run or walk through the high country I think about the stories my parents love to tell me about their times, and the people they knew in the area. They were "Freaks", members of a species no largely lost and replaced by new people who inhabit these latitudes. The story of the freaks involve werewolves who raged when the moon was full, going exhibitionist on belladonna. Easter European drinkers buried their companions who fell to the spirit in the muck. Dealers forced youths to swap chairs against plants. Maniacs thought themself to be the last inhabitants of Atlantis. Dropouts lived in castles and towers within remote villages and abandoned cities. They all lived from next to nothing, sharing their lives with their big mongrels, driving rusty cars that sometimes broke down while driving or were set into rivers by their friends. Sometimes my own generation seemed so lackluster when compared to this vivid stories; the neoliberal watershed seemingly didn't leave much space for freaks, and modernity did iron out the local folklore of my grandparents and the answers of their rebellious children alike. But nowadays I can see that while the freaks and their grandiosity vanished, they made space for other strange grandiosities - different, but still noteworthy. And while we don't drop as the flies as the freaks from my parents stories did, it is still clear that we are already in the process of passing this world to those who come after us. Yet, no revolution is in sight; rebelling against my generation would be as senseless as a revolution of my generation against the one of my parents would have been - why revolt against somebody who got no power? If there are revolts they are revolts against the substance of this world itself, not against the people who inhabit it - even though the revolutionaries do not always know this. Replacing a president, a chancellor, or a boss can only help against specific cases of corruption - but the inherent problems of the system that defines the world will stay unchanged. Asking to solve these problems is asking to overthrow the fundamental system, to replace this current world by a new one. Those who want real change want decay: Destruction is a fundamental part of change, as the opposition against it is the natural inertial force that is needed, but ultimately will vanish after prevailing for so or so long. The conservatives who blame the rebellious youth of being harbingers of doom are - from their perspective - right: Their world, the world that they know and sometimes profit from is under attack; they are a inevitable symptom of change. The real danger comes from those who claim that change without destruction, that renewal and preservation alike are possible at the same time - those are the pied pipers of stagnation, and there companions are avoidable death and misery.