I've been expecting the Revolution since, well probably 1965, certainly since 1968. Not just expecting it, either, counting on it: After the Revolution, you'll be the first one up against the wall!. But, as I'm sure everyone knows, it hasn't happened. Not only hasn't the Revolution happened but all the progress that I thought I saw and heard in the people around me back then, that I thought heralded the coming, is gone. Maybe it wasn't ever there. Maybe I only knew so few people that what I thought was true of the general population wasn't.
Maybe those who would have borne the brunt of any revolutionary action saw it coming. I'd like to think that's it. They knew what was going to happen and co-opted, lied, manipulated enough to forestall and divert. To think otherwise is to believe that people on the verge of being good turned bad. Now, I'm as cynical as a man can be (without being, you know, actually paranoid), but that would make me sad. We were so close that I could almost see the other side. And I know that that was true for others, too. So what happened? Why is everyone so selfish now? Why is everyone so greedy now (is that the same thing?)? Why is everyone so short-sighted? Perhaps, like so many other revolutions, things just have to get really intolerable. As Jefferson said, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. I think that's the direction we're heading.
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