About a year ago a friend and I were hiding in the back of a familiar coffee shop. We yakked about our usual concerns: art, The Future, Portland’s creative scene, technology, networking — the usual ball of wax for underpaid, overeducated bright young things at this point in history. As our spirits and volume rose, a woman nearby leaned in to us. She admired our passion for this material, and wished people our age had similar passion for politics. That’d change something, she thought — if young people now were as involved as they had been in the ’60s.
We agreed, at least in principle: yeah, that would be great. But you cannot separate political and cultural concerns. We aren’t living in a vacuum. “The personal is political,” now more than ever, and effective change may come from cultural transformation rather than fightin’ the power directly.
I admire the large protest movements that we saw before the Iraq war. The Portland Peace Park, that month-long encampment under the Lady of Victory, was endlessly inspiring. It was a very practical expression of dissent, taking a lot of camaraderie and good will to maintain. Against the spectre of yet another invasion, and whatever it might bring, we were all in this together.
But those protests did not stop the war. Nor did the later ones. Nor have the continued, more symbolic and less disruptive actions. The war began, and our morale took a hit. But in the four years since, the nightmare many expected — of rampant American imperialism and goose-stepping at home — has not come true. There’s no direct threat to our daily lives now. Bush and company are imploding; winds have borne off the dust of the World Trade Center. There’s no draft threatening us. We’re left to our lives, knowing things are unstable but unsure how to handle that.
No specific direction leaves us our passions for guidance: when in doubt, do what you love. Unlike earlier generations, however, ours is less interested in egotistic fulfillment than it is communal cooperation. Our world is networked, through BlackBerries or zine distros. Through these same connections we figure out how our personal loves fit into the bigger picture. Two more friends serve as examples. Both are avid bikers. Years of dodging cars inspired one to study urban planning. The other joined the Bicycle Coalition of Maine. She’s the only voice for young, commuting bikers in the group.
This paper is another good example. The hip and cynical alt-weekly remains a standard across the country. We Portlanders are less interested in that formula than we are issues immediately relevant to our lives. Because of the formula, many locals wrote the paper off as good music listings and not much else. Last year, that changed. Disgruntled folks started being more vocal and even holding meetings with the Phoenix’s editors. The result has been a series of more straightforward and important articles. “Ideas From Away” earned a lot of praise for its social foresight, while Emily Parkhurst’s rape exposé described a dire and unspoken element of Portland’s nightlife.
Back to that distant coffee-shop conversation: we are involved. It’s not the overt, or predictable, involvement that it was. Rather than protest a war, we’re trying to undermine its sources, wherever we can and with whatever’s available.
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Clayton Cameron: winds.up@gmail.com
