America Coming of Age
Julia Alvarez is a writer and, seeing things through a writer’s eyes, she “struggles with what my writing has to offer in a world where terrors are now color-coded, where the dust from our tumbled-down towers is still floating in the air, where most recently a hurricane has created our very own refugee situation.”
Alvarez is not alone. It’s become annoyingly and depressingly mainstream to suggest that everything is somehow attached to or flavored by 9/11, from CEO mega-thefts to politics losing all relevant meaning to writers blocked, or if not blocked then fearful of “what they have to offer.”
I hear echoes in all this from fifty years back, a reverberation of that lost generation with whom I shared the decades, who claimed nothing was worth the doing because we were all doomed to nuclear holocaust. A percentage of those wanderers actually succeeded in writing themselves off to communal life, marijuana, mysticism and the poetry of Allen Ginsburg.
The rest actually got on with living the…