I’m not one of these kids who has a total crush on Obama, but there’s no denying how historically fantastic the result of the election is—fantastic in the neutral sense of the word, like unbelievable and incredible.

I seriously didn’t believe it was going to happen. I thought, “There’s no way America will elect a young president/a black president/an intelligent president/a liberal president.” I’m just amazed, and that’s why I’m happy: because I don’t have words to articulate what a leap forward it is for the American dream. That Horatio Alger bullshit is, well, bullshit. The American dream is that someone with dark skin and the name “Barack Hussein Obama” is (knock wood) going to be sworn in two and a half months from now as the 44th president of the United States of America, and that his parents and grandparents of working-class and immigrant backgrounds worked their asses off to raise this guy who went from very humble beginnings to a great education and one of the fastest-moving political careers in American history. That’s why I believe in America.

I know how disillusioned I’m going to be if a year from now nothing changes, but I think that even the fact that we as a country got this far means that something is stirring. In the 1960s folks thought something was happening, something was going down. And maybe it was, maybe people were sitting in fields and expanding their consciousnesses. But what did that translate into, back in the real world? Kennedy. LBJ. Richard Nixon. Although the Civil Rights Act was passed and the Vietnam War ended, it didn’t change the fact of the Cold War, or the fact that America’s star was just starting to wane. It didn’t change the fact that Martin Luther King was assassinated or that people laughed at instead of listened to the young people who marched for peace and freedom on their college campuses.

But 40 years after the Summer of Love and Woodstock, a black man—a young educated liberal black man—was elected president. And fucking hell, that means something. Since I’ve been old enough to know what’s going on in the world, George W. Bush has been president. The first political events I remember being emotionally involved in were Bush’s victory, 9/11, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As I’ve grown up, I’ve witnessed failure after failure of the Bush administration, and I grew to voting age feeling like this country doesn’t represent me or what I believe in.

Now, no one’s perfect, by any means. Obama has opinions that I disagree with. But fuck it, he’s not George Bush. And yes, for the first time in my life, and the first time that I can think of in recent history, the grassroots made a difference on the largest scale. For the first time in my life I live in a country that adequately represents who I am and what I value. And for one of the very few times thus far in my short life, I am proud to be an American.

I’m not trying to make excuses for myself, but I think my main problem right now is that I’m having the 18-year-old’s equivalent of a midlife crisis. That sounds kind of ridiculous, I know—what do I have to worry about, being a carefree youth or whatever I am?—but I think it’s that same sense of mortality and a biological change, except kind of on the opposite side of the age spectrum. My main freakouts are about going to college, moving away from home (both in the narrow sense of my family’s house and in the broader sense of San Diego), becoming part of The Workforce, and that terrifying harbinger of losing touch with everything that has been the foundation of my life up until this point. My childhood is only a small part in the ultimate arc of my life, but right now it’s all I’ve got, and I’m scared and stressed about leaving it behind, and what I see as a fairly dramatic change in my goals and priorities and lifestyle. I’m concerned about my ability to handle responsibility, and my ability to measure up, academically and socially. My ineptitude at my current teenage summer job—and that new (to me) notion of having to do something you might not like in order to pay the bills—has been a powerful reality check and dose of culture shock, and feeds my insecurities about being successful and content in one of my privileged, middle-class, white-collar opportunities after I get a degree or two.

It hit me a couple days ago that this could very well be my last summer in San Diego, and that touched off another flood of concerns and notions of mortality, mostly centered on whether and how I’ll remain in touch with the friends I’ve made here. Part of me, the self-hating voice I’ve been giving too much rein, points out that I’ve made very little effort to keep them and make myself likeable anyway; part of me insists that I need to move on to the next stage in my life, whatever the consequences; and part of me points out that if I’m that good friends with them, we’ll stay in touch whatever happens. I mean, yeah, I want that very much. But I can already feel changes from where we were two years ago, and I don’t like to think where we’ll be four years from now, when we are unquestionably Adults in Real Life. I don’t know whether our adjusted sensibilities will hold—we may just be stories to tell our respective children (or my cats), the way my mother’s high-school friends are. To think of that happening in a few years’ time to people who are very central to my life now does make me afraid for the future, a bit.

And I fear how I’m going to change. Everyone changes as they age. I’m concerned that my values will shift, that my priorities will adjust, though that’s often a natural process as different things (like a family, for example) start to become important. But I worry that things like truth and justice will cease to be important, that I’ll focus too much on making money as a measure of success, that Ihlbrock’s prophecy will come true and the taxpaying adult won’t care about the illegal immigrants anymore. I worry that the girl who blogs snarkily about senators and sweetly about strikers and tree-sitters will become the woman who works in a corporate office and wears a suit and supports establishment centrists.

I know that I don’t have to be that way. My parents didn’t turn out that way by any means. But people keep telling me that it could happen, that it will happen, and I don’t want it to.

I don’t factor getting married and having children into my life plan the way many people my age simply assume it will be part of the future. But I wonder what that would be like, too, and though I could never imagine being in a committed relationship, I think maybe it would be nice to adopt a couple little Chinese babies and teach them what it is to be good people. I want a daughter who trusts me, a son who doesn’t think I’m stupid. I want, in a dumb way, to do my part to make the future of the world a little better and more encouraging. Maybe. But that’s weighty, too, and I worry about it, of course. Could I find the balance between a child-supporting salary and professional fulfillment? Could I make peace between radicalism and family values? Would I make my adopted progeny as neurotic as I sometimes am?

No. I wasn’t going to do the self-bashing thing.

Right now I’m just a child. I can go to a grown-up doctor and get a prescription for the Pill, I can fill out a ballot in a statewide primary, I can run the trash compactor at work. But I’m an innocent, untried, wide-eyed kid who’s fucking terrified of this huge world stretching out before her. Where suddenly the choices aren’t just which elective to take or whether to practice violin, they’re everything. Billions of minutiae I can’t rely on my parents or my teachers or my friends for. I feel alone, and in a way it’s positive and exciting. But in another way I see myself going under so easily and I’m just worried I’m going to drown in the badly-metaphored sea of independence.

We have two occasions to remember in the coming days: not only is tomorrow May Day, the annual international socialist workers’ holiday, this month also marks the fortieth anniversary of the Paris student revolutions of May, 1968. In honor of May Day, I would like to share with you the chorus of the socialist workers’ anthem, the Internationale; I would also like to present some slogans of the French students of forty years ago.

The refrain of the Internationale:
C’est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain!

Translated, I suppose this could be:
This is the final struggle
Let us gather, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be humankind!

If you’re feeling at all supportive of the working underdog, hum that a bit to yourself tomorrow, and wish your friends and neighbors a happy May Day.

I recently discovered these student slogans, which were certainly familiar and iconic to their contemporaries. The translations are my own:

Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible.
Be realistic, ask for the impossible.

On achète ton bonheur: Vole-le.
They bought your happiness: steal it.

Sous les pavés, la plage!
Under the cobblestones, the beach!

L’ennui est contre-révolutionnaire.
Boredom is counter-revolutionary.

Nous ne voulons pas d’un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s’échange contre le risque de mourir d’ennui.
We do not want a world where the certainty of not dying from hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom.

Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié ne font que se creuser un tombeau.
Those who make half-revolutions only dig their graves.

Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n’as pas besoin de lui.
The boss needs you, you don’t need him.

Vives sans temps morts—jouissez sans entraves.
Live without dead time—enjoy without chains.

Il est interdit d’interdire.
It is forbidden to forbid.

Dans une société qui a aboli toute aventure, la seule aventure qui reste est celle d’abolir la société.
In a society that has abolished all adventure, the only adventure that remains is that of abolishing the society.

La poésie est dans la rue.
Poetry is in the street.

Pouvoir à l’imagination.
Power to the imagination.

Ni Dieu ni maître!
No God nor master!

Go ahead, remember one of these sayings this month: in repeating it to your friends, in writing it on your homework, in scrawling it on a chalkboard. And if you can’t do that, at least seek a little surreality and creativity in your everyday life. Uniting behind the simple cause of not letting those in power beat us down can give us all so much hope that the future might be worth living.

Since WordPress fucks up my attempts to scale images properly, you’ll have to make do with the pdf.

I kind of want to hold a memorial service for The Movement (as my Ginsberg biography calls the amalgam that was ’60s counterculture). It’s 2008: forty years ago to the day there were hippies in the Haight; there were marches and rallies on college campuses all over the country. Forty years ago February 10 Neal Cassady died. Forty years ago August 25 a riot almost broke out at the DNC, and Allen Ginsberg calmed crowds with Buddhist chanting. Forty years ago it was possible to calm a crowd with an echoing “OM”. I asked my mom if we could protest in the streets at the DNC in Denver. She seemed dubious. In 2008, I sit in my bedroom and stress about getting into college.

Of course, the obvious question is, “Why are you not doing your part to recreate The Movement in your world?” I have rationalized it thus: I am not a leader. Everything from orchestra to tech theatre to AL proves that. I can stand on my own, but leading people is not my skill. My hope and my goal is to inspire the leaders, to rant enough radical prose that a real leader who can organize and march at the head of thousands will make the real visible difference in this world. My dream is to write the words of the next almost-revolution. It’s a far-fetched and idealistic dream but I would love for it to work.

Earlier today my mom, sister and I were listening to Pete Seeger in the car, singing “Which Side Are You On?” and “Solidarity Forever”. The next song on the CD I’d bullied everyone into listening to was Billy Bragg’s version of the Internationale (I need to learn the French words off by heart), and as we all sang along my mother suggested that in college I should form an a capella group singing labo(u)r music (the reason I’m not just sticking the “u” in is because it’s American music). But if I want to pass the music on, I should be teaching it to other people. And I do want to be passing it on: it’s a fundamental part of American history and it was always the goal of icons like Guthrie and Seeger to pass on their music and get everyone singing it. They believe(d) in the power of songs to change the world, and that’s something I still believe in. I have this misguided idea that teaching a phalanx of young people “Solidarity Forever”, and the history behind it, would incline them to believe in the power of unions and what ordinary people can do if they stand together and demand change. In years gone by, ordinary people have been heroes, when they have stood in the line of fire and resisted the attempts of bosses or police or the government or the establishment to silence them. Any of us can be that striking worker or peaceful protester who stares down a police officer and stands their ground for what they believe in.

That reminds me, today is Martin Luther King Day. Today my mother and sister and I sang “We Shall Overcome”. I assume you know how that goes, and if you don’t and you’re from the States (otherwise you’re excused), I will be shocked and appalled. The chorus goes:

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome someday
For deep in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome someday.

There are other verses that go “We’ll walk hand in hand” and “We are not afraid” and “We shall live in peace” and oh my god now I’m getting all choked up and teary, because I want so badly for this to happen. I want to see thousands of people of all ages and races and sexes and all conceivable conditions to march somewhere and demand changes in their world. I want to see the people of this country, and every other country, stand up and be counted and join together in songs and chants and the simple conviction that we can have what we want in this world, we don’t just have to sit down and take what the people in power hand us. Theoretically we live in a democracy, and although it’s something of a myth the general idea of a democracy is that the common people’s voices are paramount. We have the ability to be the change we wish to see in the world. So what are we waiting for?

Maybe we are waiting for a leader. And yeah, I’m making excuses again: but look at yourself, and I think you’ll know whether you’re a leader or not. I’m a blogger and a ranter and an iconoclast and a crazy. But maybe some of you out there are all these things and you also can raise a crowd to call out for freedom. You risk getting arrested. You risk getting shot. You risk being trampled by the powers of conformity and falling into ignominy. But there is no higher cause than to stand up for what you believe in and to stand up and speak for the innumerable people who cannot or will not. Be a voice for the needy and the downtrodden. Be strong and powerful and fuck, yes, give me reason to keep on living and believe that there is some point to growing to adulthood.

Right now, I am on the brink of that adulthood. in 15 days, 7 hours and 39 minutes it will be time for me to take hold of my inheritance as a citizen of this world. And I do not want to betray the dramatic conviction of “We Shall Overcome”. That song, which was adopted from a hymn as the anthem of the civil rights movement, leaves no question about it: we shall overcome someday — and I want to keep that promise. In Pete Seeger’s introduction to the “We are not afraid” verse, he says, “The most important verse was the one they wrote down in Montgomery, Alabama. It said ‘We are not afraid’. And the young people taught everybody else a lesson — all the older people who had learned how to compromise, and take it easy, learned how to be polite and get along, and leave things as they were, the young people taught everybody else a lesson.”

Don’t you want that to be true still?

So here I am, I’m balancing on a precipice with the chance to stand up and be counted. I intend to shout out my convictions, but I can’t do it alone. Will you provide me with the leader? Will you shout with me?

Starved of the opportunity to teach other people about the things I love, I just had a brainstorm: Living Room College.

Think about it: pretty much everyone is good at something, knows a lot about something, or is eager to share their ideas and information about something with other people. So why not enable this, in a friendly, cooperative approach to knowledge and learning?

This is how it works: a group of undetermined size (it needs at least probably half a dozen people, but could easily accommodate many more) gets together and assesses its collective abilities. Maybe one person knows a lot about programming Java, another is very talented at sketching, another is a native Spanish speaker, another is ridiculously enthusiastic about literature of the 1960s counterculture. Then all these folks get together and teach classes on their subject matter – and, of course, take each other’s classes. Unsurprisingly, this takes place in living rooms far and wide, which can easily be transformed into hallowed halls of learning.

To be enrolled in Living Room College you don’t need to attend every course or even teach one. There are no grades or score-based evaluations. The whole point is that we need more dissemination of knowledge both frivolous and practical and that we can all benefit so much by learning from each other.

This is a serious proposal, not just a hypothetical rant. The logistics might be tricky but when you have the power of idealism behind you, anything is possible.

So who’s with me?