From the Ashes

Arsonist becomes architect. Architect becomes preservationist. Preservationist becomes arsonist. The cycle’s repeated enough times in the past to qualify as a pattern, is repeating again in our day.

I was born at the tail end of America’s Baby Boom. My generational peers are in a funk, many of them anyway. Wondering what happened to the idealism of our youth, all the change we thought we were bringing about. Feeling like it’s gone sour, despairing over the country’s current condition, fretting about the mess that’s been left for younger generations to clean up.

OK boomer, lighten up. We’ve seen this episode before. Teens and twenty-somethings in those heady days of the 60s and 70s—that’s you, boomer—chafed at stifling social conformity and stratification, resented hidebound institutions, wanted to burn it all down. A whole lot burned.

1965 unrest in Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles - Hulton Archive

Out of the ashes rose a new architecture. Black power. Civil Rights Act. Voting Rights Act. Fair Housing Act. Women’s liberation. Premarital sex. Roe v. Wade. Title IX. Equal Pay Act. No-fault divorce. Interracial marriage. Medicare. Medicaid. Clean Air Act. Clean Water Act. The EPA. Americans with Disabilities Act. Gay no longer merely a synonym for cheerful. Closet doors swinging open. At long last, marriage equality.

That’s what the idealism of your youth brought, boomer. No small thing. A revolution, or at least a sweeping evolution. America was remade. Then, as human nature seems to dictate, a fierce backlash came. Subversives who took down the old structure before engineering new construction became guardians of their towering edifices. Arsons are now at the doorstep. Arsons who want America to be what it was before its makeover.

This is truly something to mourn, because it signals a national mood yearning for the old ways, longing to go back. This is a recipe for national decline. America flourishes when Americans are willing to let go of yesterday and can’t wait for tomorrow to come, anxious to build something brand new. This is truly something to hope for, to plan for, to work for.