The Generational Middle Child

Sunday night I saw something I didn't think I'd see in my lifetime. I watched Arlo Guthrie perform Alice's Restaurant, the whole freaking thing, on stage accompanied by his son, Abe on keyboard, and his grandson, Krishna on drums. Though I've heard that piece a hundred times in recorded form, experiencing it for real made it a new song. Arlo joked about Dylan, told stories, and made us all feel that even if we're one person, any small act we do just might be the one that changes history. Then he led us in a sing-a-long of This Land is Your Land and taught us the words to My Peace (lyrics by Woody, music by Arlo), and sent our refreshed minds home.

Arlo Guthrie is a legend, a near mythological creature, to me. He was at Woodstock. Both he and his dad wrote songs I wasn't really supposed to listen to because of their politics. (The exception being This Land Is Your Land, which we learned in school and ought to be our national anthem.) The evening was a bit of an attitude flashback and I felt a little rebellious being at a show my mother would disapprove of. What can I say? Some things you never outgrow.

Most of the people there were real Baby Boomers. People whose lives were shaped in part by the likes of Arlo's music and the social conflict of the sixties. They lived Alice's Restaurant. And there was me, born in that vague time zone, lumped in with the Baby Boomers because no one really figured out what we were. Sometimes we're referred to as Generation Jones or Shadow Boomers or the Lost Generation.

We were too young to have been actual hippies. We couldn't have hitchhiked to Woodstock or gone to Haight-Ashbury. We learned to smoke pot to Pink Floyd's The Wall and not Dark Side of the Moon. We had no understanding of Viet Nam. It was just bad. Everyone who made a difference got assassinated.

We weren't going to be drafted, so we didn't necessarily see college as an option unless we wanted careers instead of jobs. (Jobs were good enough for our dads, so they were probably good enough for us. Shoot, girls, you're just going to get married anyway no matter what those libbers say.) Nixon showed us we didn't have to be honest or moral, you just had to know the right people to get you out of trouble.

We got our driver's licenses in time for the energy crisis, the first one, when gas went up to like 79 cents a gallon. Inflation, stagflation, and no jobs, greeted us as we got our first apartments.The people that told us not to trust anyone over 30 were turning 30. Those celebrated Baby Boomers had disappeared into suits and suburbs.

We were left with the crumbs of Flower Power, Free Love, and Hell No We Won't Go. We were 4 hours and 20 minutes too late for "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out." By the time we graduated high school, all the cool rock stars were dead and disco was on its brief way in. There was a flash of punk. Caught between peasant skirts and polyester jumpsuits, Earth shoes and platform heels, marijuana and cocaine, we didn't seem to have a cultural identity for more that 5 minutes.

Those of us who didn't embrace the me-me-me eighties or Ronald Reagan, ate government cheese, and took the bus, are an odd sub-culture of our own generation. We didn't get to be real hippies, but we get called hippies now because that's what the Gen X's and Y's think we are. (I believe they suck at history more than my generation.) Our heroes are fictional because real ones die. We really can't understand the greed that fuels human suffering today. We look for leaders, but know they will fail us or maybe be killed.

We've marched against war, often with people older or much younger than ourselves - as was the crowd at the Arlo Guthrie concert. The old hippies were there, but so were the young ones. I've seen them coming up. They've learned about the Diggers and the social activism of the sixties. The stuff that made a positive difference, even if for a very brief time. In small pockets, they're reviving what my Lost Generation couldn't get a handle on. In our city we've got Food Not Bombs feeding anyone who is hungry in the parks and Free Geek offering lessons in computer technology at no charge and teaching people to build their own machines. They're green kids running the Really, Really Free Market once a month and finding joy in sharing, conserving, and recycling. They're becoming organized. They're getting grants.

They are probably as disconnected from their own Generation X and Y friends as I am from the rightwingers that grew out of my generation. (I tend to think of those people as much older than myself, though we are the same age.) I'm amazed how much more politically aware the new hippies are than when I was their age. They want peace, love, and social justice. They like to keep life simple, but they're not afraid to use computers to find out how to grow potatoes in trash cans.

I imagine the original hippies, the real Baby Boomers, never dreamed when they hung up their bell bottoms that their grandchildren would don them and go to an Arlo Gunthrie concert. Grandparents went in search of the past and grandkids went searching for the America they'd heard of. In the middle of it all, I sat feeling I'd been there, but only as an observer, and wondering when my generation will be found.