How I Understand Easy Rider [finally]

Now I had heard the analysis of a very important scene in Easy Rider a few times but I haven’t really gotten it until now. Basically, when Peter Fonda’s character says “we blew it” after Dennis Hopper’s character decides they’ve found the American dream, it means that they blew their inheritance. Now this struck a chord recently as I was thinking about a number of things, but most importantly the nature of protest and blind faith in either side of the political spectrum. To me, this scene in Easy Rider means that despite the positive and lofty ideals of the hippie movement, many of their actions alienated the people who were supposed to listen and act upon these new ideas. Consequently, few meaningful things were done. I look at what was going on then and instead of acting in a meaningful way to change the systems that they disagreed with, many of the people engaged in increasingly irrelevant displays of protest or activities that made them look threatening or foolish in the eyes of people not directly involved. To me, this translates into current forms of protest. Simply by showing up to an event, to say, protest the World Bank or free Tibet, very little is going to happen. Take the more striking example of Bush ignoring several million protesters across the world that showed up to voice their opinion against the war in Iraq. Now whether or not you agree with these opinions is irrelevant, and quite honestly I actually agree with many of these protests. But protesting has not been effective since civil rights. During the civil rights era, protesting was a way of showing up and forcing people to accept truly equal rights. By showing up to a lunch counter, blacks were taking their legal rights to eat at the place of their choice. This was an effective way to show inequality and combat the effects of legal or de facto racist policies. However, when the people who enact negative policies simply have to walk around cordoned off protesters waiving largely meaningless signs, it does not effectively get the message across anymore. Protesting has become an irrelevant way of voicing opinions because you begin to look ridiculous. Whether or not I agree that Tibet should be out from under Chinese rule makes no difference when the people who are activists for this cause are extinguishing the Olympic flame because that will show those Chinese government officials they mean business. The result is actually the opposite. I want to associate less with this movement because of the meaningless and ridiculous gestures they perform to get their point across. I believe that the World Bank and IMF should reinterpret their policies, but there is no way I would show up to a protest because it is a largely meaningless and irrelevant gesture anymore. In the time it took for me to get to the protest site and the basically stand around for a few hours I could have come up with an action plan to start an organization and talk to decision making officials directly in a way that has a possibility of affecting real changes in policy. Being from the DC area, there are several times when I’ve had the opportunity to laugh at the World Bank/IMF protesters, and let me tell you, I have.

I'm not going to have to kill myself next election cycle

So for the last few election cycles I’ve been worried about the candidates. Now this is not just because I disagree with one of the candidates, let’s say Bush for the sake of argument, but really all of them. But this election cycle I don’t think I’m going to have to kill myself or make empty ridiculous threats about moving to another country. Look I was 18 at the time and I thought it was a perfectly feasible option. But this time around, despite all the “bitterness” or whatever, I actually think that deep down these candidates are all fairly reasonable people and so even if someone I don’t necessarily agree with is elected, I think they would do a fine job. Or rather, fine enough that I won’t have to do anything drastic. This is actually something I came to drawing on a lot of reading. I had a temp job where I basically sat around for nearly 7 hours out of any given day, so I had plenty of time to read all the articles written about all the candidates (and this was in November 2007 so it was when there were many candidates). I sat and took the Washington Post survey that helped me pick a candidate (which turned out to not be the one I voted for in the Virginia primary) even though it was a fairly poor questionnaire, but that’s not the point. The point is for the first time I was a model citizen and made an informed decision based on the candidate’s position on the issues. I suppose it’s also story time real quick. Since Virginia doesn’t make you register with a party in order to vote in the primary, my initial plan was to go and vote for John McCain so Mitt Romney wouldn’t win any more delegates. After working at this temp job, which was a campaign-mailing place, I really didn’t like the whole “CEO President” thing. But he dropped out so that never came to pass. But, the day of the Virginia primary there was a bunch of ice on the roads and so after sliding across the parking lot to my car I tried to rush to the polls, but everyone was driving about 15 miles an hour. Anyway, I voted so everything turned out ok.
But, I suppose there is another relevant thing I have been thinking about too, and it is this: all this change that all these candidates are promising is not going to come soon. I mean, yeah we can start working towards all these ideas and policies, and it’s certainly good to have goals to strive towards, but it just seems that all these things will take some time. I just think sometimes people may lose track of that when they get wrapped up in how much better the next president will be than Bush. In fact, I almost think these candidates will have a lot of work to do. A recent Economist article basically puts forth that even though there will be a honeymoon period where the international community will cut the new president some slack, after a rather short period of time, there need to be results. So basically the new president needs to act quickly to keep up the good graces of the international community, based on not being Bush anymore. I’m not sure what that will entail because there is so much to work on, but whatever the next president decides needs to start with repairing a lot of the severed ties from the Bush administration. Even the BBC is getting in on this http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7325658.stm. This article mentions the whole idea that the international community is becoming more open to working with the US. This is very positive in terms of working with the global community, which is something that really needs to be strengthened from now on.