The war in Iran is an urgent call to members of Generation X, Y and Z that we must rise to our destiny, or risk disappearing, as previous generations have, into the mythology of American exceptionalism.
Members of Generation X lost brothers, cousins and friends in a useless war in the Iraq desert, like our parents did in the jungles of Indochina. Yet, around 1980 or so, our parents got on board the gravy train of individualism, high technology and financial engineering, and it’s been a roller coaster ride in the pitch dark ever since.
The financial crisis of 2008 should have been a warning that we are overleveraged as a society, but alas, it was only a worn-down speed bump to the next overvalued frontier of AI — which no one really understands or can control but is somehow pitched as the miracle that is going to save us. Unlike our grandparents and parents — who lived under Jim Crow and the bomb — we were taught and tested in school about the hypocrisies and unfulfilled ideals of America.
Capital and technology have no agency outside the social relations that produce and command them. It is past time that our generations take action to correct the deficiencies that define the American character, or risk becoming yet another caricature of privilege.
Christopher Hardy
Washington Street
