When I became a thinking adult, the sixties were over, from Paris to the Haight.

But in my little town, ten years behind the curve, to my fresh mind, they were everything.

My music was 60s music. My drugs were the sixties drugs. My sexuality was, in theory at least, my path to liberation. My christian republican parents could see it and they recoiled from what I was slowly becoming.

I was totally convinced that pot would be legalized as soon as the children of the sixties came of voting age in mass numbers, and that all aspects of society would change to a saner and more free way of life along with that token element. Tokin’ element. Heh.

Why didn’t that happen?

For one thing, the boomers as a group were never as revolutionary as they played at or flirted with.

When they were offered opportunities to be co-opted, and Drop Back In, they jumped at them. Collectively, they weren’t Abbie Hoffmann. They were Jerry Rubin, delighted to be brokering stocks in a three piece suit (or whatever the fuck he did for the rest of his short miserable corporate life).

The reason the Revolution failed was that simple human greed (“I just want my children to have a better life than I have”) was a stronger motivation. Overthrowing the system gets way less attractive once you’ve decided to sell out and join that system. I even know that from a decade of experience in my own life … but that’s a topic for another show.

Even though I’m in rehab from the System’s poison, even though I’m detoxing from it and getting the shakes from withdrawal every god-damn day … I’m voting for Biden, provided I can bring myself to finally fill out this ballot sitting here at my right hand, this week.

I’m in a swing state, I tell myself. It’s the most ANTIFAscist thing I can do under the circumstances, I say …

I take up these beliefs even though I’m no longer even a pretend System junkie, even though I’d like to think I never really was one.

My teenage self would say: Don’t trust anyone over thirty; and my teenage self wouldn’t be all wrong. Because with time, they get to you a little, even if you’re really good, and I’m really good.

But I had a flash of hope, listening to some young black women from Atlanta, on MSNBC via Secular Talk.

I realized something important, and that is that the System isn’t really trying to co-opt people any more. They’ve won. They don’t have to. A teenager today can’t even get a job, and even if they do, the minimum wage at forty (or twenty-nine) hours a week won’t buy them a car, or an iPhone, or get real health care, or even get them out of Mommy’s basement.

Sure, a community college Dean, given the chance, will try to sell them a bill of goods about getting a few certificates and winning the game. But even the Dean knows he’s lying, to most of them. He’s not promising them the American Dream. He’s trying to keep his shithole college afloat until he can retire. From the System. In a gravy boat he thinks is big enough for him.

Planet’s on fire, asshole, and that’s just as true for your kids as the ones you dutifully bamboozle.

The Atlanta ladies have heard enough of your lies. Trump, Biden, it’s all the same. And feeding them a heaping helping of identity politics with Kamala? Well, DNC, you can kiss their asses. You might be able to count on Aunt Kizzie’s vote until she dies, but she’s a boomer girl that got infected by the lie when there were people like Robert Kennedy to vote for. But they shot Bobby, and gave us Reagan. Clinton. John fucking Kerry, that avatar of the sellout. Hillary god damn Clinton. She’s a woman, too! Some restrictions may apply! Not valid in Wisconsin!

There is no glorious dress-up Revolution this time.

There’s just the brutal grinding hell of the flooding world Auntie and the rest of her co-opted, work-within-the-System pigshit generation left them, and–guess what, motherfuckers?–they have eyes to see.

So we got that going for us. They’re not voting for either buffoon. That radiates me with glowing hope. Too little too late? Yeah maybe. Probably. So what? At least these young women will go down Woke, not in that crappy half-ass multi-culty way, but actually woke, to the reality of how this world works and who pulls the strings.

God bless the child, that’s got his own. Got. His own.