Life, According to: Chaos

I wasn't alive during the Vietnam years. My parents, though alive they were, didn't pay very much attention to the way their world was changing. My mother was too young, and my father was only marginally older; old enough to know, but not to understand. The culture of the time was turbulent, like an airplane that had hit a massive typhoon and didn't quite know how to course correct. And, oddly enough, I see striking similarities in the world I'm stuck in the middle of.

Now we are faced with many of the same problems, and I am seeing signs of very similar social unrest. I don't believe we will ever hit the levels of protest and counter-culturism we peaked at during the late 60s and early 70s, but we're not exactly attempting to avoid that eventuality. Instead, we are still engaged in a war that nobody wants to be a part of, still battling for the civil rights of American citizens, and still unsure which of our presidential candidates is the least dangerous option. 

I never imagined in a million years that I would live in a time where half of the country wants to blow other countries up, and the other half thinks we ought to blow ourselves up so that we can start the whole damn thing from scratch. On some level, I sympathize with those who believe the latter. This country, as it is, has always required something nearly catastrophic to really change for the better. In the 1800s, it was the Civil War; in the early 40s, it took a World War to pull us out of the Great Depression and launch an era of economic prosperity; in the latter half of the 20th century, it took a widely unsupported war for this country to understand that the government doesn't always do the people's bidding. The common theme here is that chaos, in all of it's forms, has always been an agent of change for the United States. The question, as such, is just how chaotic do we need to get before the necessary changes are made in this generation, this version of the political system?