WALKABOUT
Usually when you go to a demonstration you start at a gathering place, hear some speeches that energize you, go walking with your signs, chant, and end up back where you were or at some other place where there are more speeches. You put your signs in piles or the trunk of your car and go home. Four hours max.
On Tuesday, I watched Katie Tur on MSNBC as she walked with demonstrators in New York. And I watched and watched and kept on watching. Every time they touched base with her the crowd had swelled and they were in some new part of town. They started at 1:00. She was still marching at 8:00. She walked eighteen miles with protestors that day.
“It’s a walkabout,” I thought as I strolled in my neighborhood. “The kids – they are searching for meaning.”
A walkabout is a rite of passage young men take at puberty in Australian Aboriginal society. It is a transition, from one way of being in the world to another. It is a time to connect to ancestors, to wander, to make your own way and survive.
Obviously walking in Manhattan and walking in the Australian Outback are different. But the quest for making meaning in your culture, and connecting to whatever wisdom has been passed down, is universal. We have no clearly recognized rites of passage for young people in America; various groups do, with the quinceaneras and the bar/bat mitzvah, but even the ritual of getting a driver’s license is less universal these days.Yet the hunger for belonging, for understanding where you are, who is credible, what paths have heart – that is pulsing for all people as they grow up.
And what have they been given? A lying, cheating leader. An economy that pits them against each other. A corrupted legal system. Schools that reproduce the inequities of the culture. Uncertain care from the health system. A planet in crisis. Meaningless work.
The last cuts across class lines. Poorer kids are faced with jobs in service industries that are dehumanizing. I don’t care how many plaques McDonald’s puts up about employee of the month: no kid says to themselves, “I want grow up and sit in a booth and pass fries to people in cars.” For the kids from the suburbs - who were pressured to do soccer and science club and take the obligatory trip to a needy country in Latin America or Africa instead of have any free time or figure out what they want to do – they see folks ahead of them graduating from good colleges and searching for any job, let alone one with meaning or satisfaction. What was all that pressure and sacrifice about?
So they are walking. And walking. And walking.
And sometimes they sit. That same night I watched as thousands of people sat on the ground in Minneapolis. They weren’t chanting; they were listening. “They’re sitting in council,” I thought. Over the blather of the TV talking heads you could hear occasional eruptions of applause. It wasn’t a concert. It wasn’t Coachella - nobody seemed loaded or drunk. And nobody sponsored this: there weren’t any corporate logos, only handmade cardboard signs. Up front was somebody with a bullhorn or a makeshift speaker system. So why were all these people out late listening hour after hour, sitting on bricks and blacktop? Because the speakers made sense. Which is more than their president does.
George Floyd’s death is the flashpoint. The media blah-blah is about reform, rioting, presidential powers. This is so much bigger than that. It encompasses that and a universe of meanings that are emerging like grass through the broken concrete. The bankruptcy of our coffers is nothing to the bankruptcy of our imagination, Space X being just the latest feeble effort to replay the hits of former generations. This generation is coming together to build their future, the one we older people dumped on them so unceremoniously from our lack of credible leadership. The one no-one-has-any-idea-what-it-will-be but it couldn’t be worse than the trajectory we are on. Between walking and sitting, between exploring and absorbing, this generation is shaping themselves to guide the future. I hope to live to see it.