On the Work to Be Done

This article originally appeared in the May 28, 1998 issue of Rolling Stone.

The only specifically American inventions that have made this a better world are Alcoholics Anonymous and jazz, and jazz has no bad side effects.

But one piece of AA's advice to recovering addicts, that they live one day at a time, so infects the brains of those who are wrecking the planet as a life-support system nowadays, recovering addicts or not, that it might as well be Hong Kong chicken flu or mad-cow disease. To have gotten through Tuesday, say, with an atmosphere still breathable and water still potable at bedtime is for those so afflicted to be as happy as pigs in shit, so to speak.

Some accomplishment!

Rolling Stone has asked me to discover what the American Dream looks like in the mind of some young person of my acquaintance, with the year 2000 hanging over his or her head by a thread, like the sword of Damocles. Without even looking into such a mind, I can offer at least this much comfort: The year 2000 has come and gone, and damned if we didn't survive it!

Listen: The best information we have today is that Jesus was born in 5 B.C., or five years before Himself. Chalk that up as another miracle! Yes, and that means that the 2,000th year of the Christian era was what we mistakenly called "1995."

What apocalypse, what test of our determination to go on living, did we endure back then? Friends and neighbors, young and old alike, think a minute, think TV.

It was the O.J. Simpson case!

As for our young:

Those who graduate from high school or college this spring are not Generation X or Y, as envious middle-aged baby boomers have been pleased to tag them. They are as much Generation A as Adam and Eve were, as the middle-aged baby boomers, their parents, used to be.

As I read the Book of Genesis, God didn't give Adam and Eve a whole planet.

He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion let's say 200 acres.

I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.