The Brightening

The Brightening

In the brightening

before the crooked pinch on the wick,

the good were fragile~

 the best, blind bonfires

 soon scattered to ash

around which we danced

til wind and time,

hate or the authorities

blew them away

 

to give us  blood and stormlight, 

the blister of wildfires, 

firebombed ruins

 burning jungles and napalmed skin.

Blame us because

we had to burn;

but first

you

put out

one
flame.

~March 2017

This summer will be the 50 year anniversary of the summer of love, 1967. Photos show what else just happened to be going on back then.

For Kerry's Annotations

I have used photographic annotations, but also include some textual ones below.

Images of the 1960's courtesy of google, public domain: 

Two young women at a Viet Nam war protest; Robert F. Kennedy shortly after being fatally shot, lying on the pantry floor of the Ambassador Hotel in LA, heard asking, "Is everyone alright?";  Headlines in the NYT, April 4th 1968; Young woman dancing; Young men burning their draft cards; Students at U.C Berkeley demonstrating against Dow Chemical, manufacturer of napalm, used in Viet Nam to burn jungle areas, often resulting in high civilian casualties.

Some results of googling "how baby boomers destroyed everything' 

Including

A Generation of Sociopaths: How The Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Alexander S Balkin at Salon:

We can thank baby boomer[s]... for a nation that has no sound policy on foreign affairs, the environment, energy, social welfare, human rights, terrorism, technology development, education, debt, etc.  

Bruce Cannon Gibney in the Boston Globe:

The body politic rests on the slab because boomers put it there, because decades of boomerism produced the problems and disaffection of which 2016 was merely the latest expression.  

Baby Boomers Ruined America at marketwatch:

".. Though these circumstances are new, making the argument that a generation -- particularly boomers -- are to blame for society’s ills is part of a storied tradition, said Jennifer Deal, the senior research scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership..."There are a lot of people who like to blame the baby boomers for stuff and this has been going on for as far as I can tell since the late 60s,” Deal said.

Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post

"Dear millennials:I’ve been reading articles about how we baby boomers suck. And how your generation is going to fix everything mine screwed up.If you Google “baby boomers are bad,” you get hundreds of hits, including these: “Baby boomers ruined America.” “ ‘Disgusting, Selfish, Immature’: 10 reasons baby boomers are the worst generation.” “Who destroyed the economy: The case against the baby boomers.” And my favorite, “Boomer scumbag.”
Most of these articles were written by millennials.Their argument, in general, is that boomers are responsible for all of the ills of the past 30 years, including unnecessary wars, political gridlock, economic recession followed by economic stagnation and, finally, that they are responsible for creating the toxic, miasmic ideological swamp out of which crawled the malevolence that is Donald Trump.."

Yeah, right.