quiet students discontented octogenarians

quiet students discontented octogenarians

fiction
edward w pritchard

go ahead and blow up the bridge, the river's not as cold as it use to be

The students are polite and very quiet when the grandson learning to walk and I pass them on their campus. Students here seems to have no badges of unity and other than their backpacks and their student loan meal plan cards the college students in my town  display no communal party patches of solidarity at all observable to the casually interested.

Also wearing the backpacks now a days are the underclass of America best observed as humble folks traveling about on city buses or on street-corners carrying signs to pander coins from rushing motorists. The signs are not political messages against our leaders but pleas for sustenance presented handwritten in magic marker on cardboard signs stored under expressway bridges and sometimes shared by more than one of the near homeless standing in a cold rain around holidays here in our hometown. There seems to be no connections between the backpacks worn by the near homeless locally and the students use of backpacks as the students use backpacks starting in fifth grade and on into college to carry expensive books to learn how to succeed in the business world and the near homeless use backpacks to display an affiliation with American cultural norms to authority persons driving about in shiny uniforms and new expensive vehicles paid for by the Octogenarians in our Society.

The octogenarians are the ones who are discontented now a days. The old guys  don't listen to Barry McGuire " Eve of Destruction" anymore but they often complain vocally about inept government leadership, inequality in the implementation of taxation strategies across the Centuries, and have strong opinions on which middle age wealthy male glamour boy understands the forgotten man in America the best. Octogenarians should never wear a backpack- it's like putting a hat on a horse, and anyone over sixty five in America is pretty much harmless anyway in reality, that is unless he is an older  male politician. In any case the elderly including the octogenarians have no solidarity either. The elderly have no clout collectively at all because too many of them are sidetracked by economic issues but when sitting in a group at the McDonald's having  the discounted senior coffee the elderly express loudly to the entire dining area strong heart felt opinions on libertarian-ism, rising health insurance costs, property taxes and of course why if a person can stand in a cold rain all day holding a sign begging for money from drivers at expressway exits why can't they just get a job, like everyone else.

There is no Solidarity in America among the students, the under classes, the elderly or anyone else that I can see. But somehow we all maintain the Hope that the wealthy short haired conservative male politicians will look out for the interests of all of us commoners. Most of the time we just go on with our lives forgetting about how dysfunctional things are now compared to when Ulysses S Grant or Warren G. Harding was our President

Advice to students from one of the elderly? I hear our new President wants to beef up our navy with some new mega battle ships and restart the nuclear arms race. Students work for or invest in companies that make 1950's style bomb shelters and maybe listen to a little of Barry McGuire's " Eve of [Disruption] strike that of Destruction". Both are a little corny but since the future is so hard to predict I recommend -everything old is new again. Watch for me in a backpack hiking along watching and silently observing or maybe complaining and pontificating a little too loud over a McDonald's senior coffee.