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Inspiration: an older gent’s complaint from Oklahoma about a brush with two drifted young people possibly wanted for crime elsewhere.

Here’s the reflection From the Awesome Conversation –>

A reminder at this point: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/10/04/an-american-report-card/ (10/4/2019). It’s hard believing the post has aged more than a year. Nonetheless, we have a large complex system for about 328 million people, and there’s a level of chaos in it served by criminal networks. The old “hippies” that would go on to “find themselves” may have distilled down to a wretched lot without a forward-moving cohort for channeling. The two cultures, criminal and not, glorified drifters and made an industry of the set loose young a long time ago. It still looks pretty on stage —

The American reality has not been so pretty for or with those so lost and rattling around desperate for basics and belonging.

Children, pretty much, depending on connections, family, and personal issues may be thrown into a . . . nothing, actually, deeply impersonal and mercenary, and one may wonder what that’s like today, so much attention having been paid to the “Baby Boom” generation and some successive as cohorts. Whoever they are now, they were all in it together (at Woodstock or Altamont or the Isle of Man — or places as meaningful in their generational journey).

Where are today’s American “set loose young”?

I’ve been at this desktop for so many years that I may even wonder at the look of the latest in disaffected lost youth. Sneakers, jeans, backpacks, and gadgets? Who holds on to what? How? Where are they going? What’s open (beyond the Amazon depot — or is that it?).

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