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…