Thirty years
I’m 26 minutes (and less as I type) from the end of my thirtieth birthday. Lucas, Jake and I are watching “The Daily Show” on Tivo, which is covering the five-year annivesary of the Iraq invasion. Five years ago today, I was twenty-five and marching in an anti-war protest with my childhood best friend Angela through downtown Seattle. During the start of the war, I consumed every news source I could find covering the lead-up to war and initial action. I spent 20 March 2003 furious that my year would consumed with worry, outrage and waiting out the idiot thinking behind the invasion.
Five years later, I’m sitting on my couch watching ironic coverage…and still waiting and furious. Angela moved out for graduate school in anthropology; I work for a news outlet/monolithic software factory. Maybe somebody marched today, but I didn’t care to even find out what ineffectual action they planned. My outrage has faded to the bitter realization that I spent the majority of my twenties—my formative becoming-an-adult years—lamenting nearly every adult decision I saw. The debts run up during the last ten years will be the same fundamental causes I’m paying for when I’m fifty. Were it not for my own instinctive resolution to have impact beyond this era, my life’s major contributions would be limited to playing out the farce’s eddys when it is well off the world stage and a matter for government-appointed lawyers.
Would be limited. …Right up until I’m seventy and come back with a AARP-lobby vengance against some poor youngsters who will never wrap their oversized, idealistic heads around the reasons I’m so goddamn pissed off and anti-authoritarian. Shit.
