A Great Tragedy

A Great Tragedy

There is an unspoken of tragedy that has claimed the lives, minds, and souls of millions around us. It has driven some to murder, some to suicide, many others to destitution and a dependency on alcohol and drugs. A very small portion of those victims currently on the path to destruction may be saved, but the tragedy will continue.
It is a war that has no real media coverage; a famine with no relief; a drought that can not be reversed.
You will not find any great mention of this tragedy on Google or Wikipedia, and there are very few informative publications available that can provide any great detail. The depth of its influence will not grow or subside with the changing of the seasons or the calendar year. The worst politicians provide nothing to aid its victims, and even the good ones make it worse.
It is a war of ideals.
It is a religious war; or, a war of religious indifference.
It is a war for the soul. A war the soul of my generation.
My generation…
…lost.
We are the middle children of history forced to swallow ideals and dreams that, when the world turned, held no true value. We were sold the drive for greatness, and lives of insignificance. There is no great crusade that can define my generation; no true pilgrimages and voyages of discovery that we can undertake; no real God that we have witnessed; and we are given little truth that withstand testing.
The quest for the truth, not of our origins or past, but of our present, seems only to breed bitterness, contempt, overwhelming impotence. We have allowed ourselves to become distracted by ‘things’ we must own and have stopped questioning and fighting for true freedom.
But, then again, what prisoner would seek escape or release when all manners of distractions and comforts are provided by the prison?
Why question the gaolers when they offer a life so ***** comfortable?
We have settled for the distraction of artificial needs provided to stop us ever becoming restless waking from the slumber. Cosmetics, clothing, cars, entertainment systems, new drug trends ( that may or may not for a brief period of time provide new insight into our situation, but through usage make us powerless to alter the reality ), even music, once the great communicator and avatar of social change has lost its spirit, and seems to advertise the notion of conformity through the hunt for riches or glory, rather than promoting through power through real change.
We are a generation that watched awestruck at the creation of the bomb of modern technology, the nano-age; yet, when that bomb of technology exploded into its present state and everyday usage we were blown aside in the blast. Shocked we watched as the generations after us embraced its designs and created a world unfit for ideals, designing new futures with that technology in mind and in hand. The generations that had been before us had already built their futures, lives, careers; thought out long before this technology was in control. But my generation, were born into one world, raised in another, and set free in this one. We were the Star Wars generation, led to believe that our world would respect an ideal as our motivation and ambition, all the while being bred in a culture that would respect no ideals. We have no true motivation for riches or power, so our drive is stunted. We can no longer accept nihilism just for the comfort it may offer us.
Some may say that all these things are simply nothing more than lame excuses for that segment of my generation that wants to do nothing but sit around and get wasted as the traffic and clouds pass us by. But, sadly, they would be wrong. This generation drifts along despondent at the perversity of the world around it. There was a time once, I am sure, that a large segment of this generation would have banded together and, formed a political ideal, maybe not utopian, but solid and representative enough of our needs and the needs of society around us to provoke a movement for a true and positive change in the social order: revolution.
However, in this, the age of discreet police-states and extreme restriction of civil liberties, the notion of revolution is as ludicrous as the justification of terrorism. Not only would any attempted revolution fail in modern Western society, but were it to succeed the depth of the problems that the revolutionaries, upon taking power, would inherit would inhibit and deny any intrinsic social change.
For a revolution to succeed it is not only the political parties and their values which require change, but the entire moral code of society as a whole.
But, I digress. This is not about revolution in the social order, this is about one generation in particular that, while needing change, is more concerned with changing the perception of its own nature and identity. It is the loss of our identity and our role in society that has made us a generation of excess, almost obsessed with annihilation rather than a definition, of self. Even the art that we produce has become artificial. So many of us striving to create our pieces of disposable art rather than pieces that will stand the test of time. Why? Probably because it has become known that any art that stands for generations will be viewed, judged, and defined differently than in times of its inception and introduction to culture. Hence the artist becomes redefined. And we live in an age where it is the artist that seeks value for himself and the art is secondary, to be tossed aside as casually as the society around us. Our message to the future: our world and lives meant nothing, why should our art?
To a degree it is an almost valid premise. This age of atrocity, where tragedies occur and claim thousands of lives daily: AIDS, famine, natural disasters caused by technologies, wars so unjust that they can not possibly be so real as to touch the lives of those not directly involved. Life is as disposable as our consumables, packaged and given value through the plastic it displays. Were we to view any of it as having any deep or great meaning then we would not only have to accept responsibility for the actions of our culture, but would also have to accept it as our responsibility to care and to fight for significant global change, and the change that is required, at first glance, is far too daunting a task to even begin to consider, and would, at this juncture require us to put aside our chemicals and our distractions and, sadly, grow up because of the failure of the generations before us. And this world is far too fragile to be capable of containing such a terrible anger as my generation would pour forth upon that maturity.