We Were Punk

We were kids. I was anyway. Some of us were young adults, but we didn’t have a vote or any sort of representation. More importantly, we didn’t make or control the world. We didn’t have any sort of wealth or power. We were outsiders simply because we were kids. We watched the generation of kids that had rejected the premises for war in the 60’s, the ones who had “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out” grow up to be yuppies who not only bought into the system, but profited from it. And they told us the story of a vast evil empire in the east with a nuclear arsenal that could end every life in America in a matter of moments. They told us that our only recourse was to assemble an even greater, more menacing, nuclear arsenal of our own so that we could ensure that all of the enemy lives would also be ended if this possibility became a reality. They taught us in school to duck and cover if we saw a flash in the sky. At the same time they told us that a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR would likely end all life on Earth. Then they taught us the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem and they told us to be proud. But we weren’t proud. We were naturally scared. As fear turned into anger we began to come to the conviction that all of this was ridiculous, that our parents’ generation, with their shirts and ties and fake smiles and hair spray, were completely full of shit, that the basic premises of our society were stark naked stupid. And so it was completely natural for us to want to do the opposite, to call the bluff. It was as natural as breathing to raise a middle finger to our parents, to the flag, to the cold war and to everything that represented that status quo which had brought us to the brink of annihilation. So we put a sneer on our face, we dyed and spiked our hair, and we played raucous music. We were punk.