Raid police have entered our campus. Marches have retaliated, cleared stomping grounds for tents and free food, sometimes shouting angry, sometimes naked, and always with a hint of rouge. A generation of squares has passed into leadership, an Ominous X, and now knitted squares arise, trying to cut out a history for the people, for the Generation Why.
“But this is not my place. I am not from here. I do not speak the language here, nor do I understand its history. This simple business transaction between myself and the University must not be sidetracked by local politics.”
Look around you, what does your bubble consist of if not the people of the City? Where are you free to go? Only where you have been before? Alas, the present fantasy..
As a generation of students, we are tech-dependent: our ventricles palpitate from the technological tentacles of various life-enhancing machines:
Streamfeeds, surfing on Chrome like a cosmic superhero, StumblingUpon Operas, or into Safaris. Webcrawling through an alert hive-mind, arguing, discussing, laughing, learning, making connections, breaking barriers, reshaping and rethinking, and always, always editing. Even in our sleep, we map pathways in our minds to make the stars align, or to redefine the symbols and signs of our times. We no longer rest, tired and rewired, yet still feeling blessed.
But, the power of this generation, this embryo cannot be harnessed until the foetus accepts that it is no longer in vitro, but fully grown. An amniotic sea change is required, when the egg will hatch, and a new age will be born. And this era shall be marked not by differences of age or experience, or of generation, or of race, colour, creed! No! Those are the scars of the annals of history, bygone pages of ragged civility, that must not be reopened, for we can access a power far beyond ourselves, if we would only merge our minds, without the limitations of ego.
Humanity has fled the trees of knowledge from which we evolved to the sprawling space-like dimension of the synapse structure and we are carried by the shoulders of giants through it, already gingerly dipping our toe into the Red Planet. Scanning it. Planning escape from the possible destruction of our race.
Indeed, these are ill times and I have seen far too many students walking in the eye of the storm, and complaining about the inferior quality of their manufactured shoelaces, because they were worried about the risk of an unexpected stumble, of a scraped knee, while the foundation of our species, and of our societies, is picked apart by the wind. Literally.
The planet is fermenting, like rot, and releasing waves upon waves of heat: pure chaotic energy. Humanity’s strict requirement for rigidity and structure has untethered the tides of the Earth.
An imbalanced geostasis, all for roads to nowhere, symbolic infrastructure, and destructive technology, and now the wheel of entropy spins out of control.
And regression occurs in times of tension, and fundamentalism emerges as a threat, a sociological, psychological terror that preys upon our doubts and upon our fears. And the stories just get stranger and stranger. The inconsistencies of 9/11 and the subsequent “War on Terror”, Project MKUltra, the use of scopolamine in the Colorado shooting (the Devil’s Breath), the LIBOR scandal, the ever-silent media oligarchy, the BP oil spill, Plan Nord, Goldman Sachs immunity. These all affect YOU. We are citizens of the World now, and it’s time we recognize that.
Over the year, some have seen and participated in the buzz-buzz-buzz of the hornet’s nest, others have listened to their friends and planned ahead, and still others have sheltered themselves from the throbbing vein of politics and power that steadily injects adrenaline and ill-begotten vitamins into the City and into the University. But all have felt the need for change, the tender vibrations of our species suffering, quelled beneath the tools that would give us freedom, if we only looked at the horror of our times with honesty.
We are an international university, so what are your politics when they come knocking at the door? Or when they provide the ground beneath your floor? Are they mine, or theirs, or yours?