Walter Mosley by Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

distribution of wealth, young people have important contributions to make to the general dialogue about the way things actually are and, therefore, how change might be effected.
    We cannot blame the youth for the TV shows, movies, ads, and campaigns that rob them of their wealth and (seemingly) their sanity. The term bling was co-opted by Madison Avenue and made into a billion-dollar business that the youth feed into but do not, in any meaningful way, profit by. Our culture, economy, and any hope for a future lie heavily on the
backs of our youth—and they know it. They rhyme about it and live out the frustrations in the streets and in their veins. They know many things but we also robbed them, most importantly, of a proper education that might enable them to speak to us about their world in our nomenclature.
    The innocent future of the world belongs to the young while the past is our crime. My generation—the generation that, for the most part, sat by witnessing the holocaust of Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, and elsewhere—now has rising ire against inner-city gangbangers and drug dealers. Can’t we see these actions as attempts for (a small portion of) our youth to bring organization and a conception of justice into their lives? Can’t we see that we forced this world into existence even as we now abandon it for the sweet dreams of a past that may have never been?
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    From our strongholds, our belief in a world that has long-since passed its zenith, we control and then castigate the young as they suffer for our mistakes. Do we honestly believe that the young have refused to take up the reins, to obtain a useful education, to face adulthood while at the same time living within a worldwide system of consumerist infantilization? After all ...
who makes the video games and bling , the fancy shoes and TV reality shows? The young people don’t own or control this world; they merely finance it with their sparse dollars, their blood and souls.
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    What am I trying to get at in this diatribe? It’s simple: We (the supposed elders) have to begin to create a collaborative relationship between ourselves and the youth of America and the world. We have to realize that we can’t just ask inner-city youth to give up their gangs and music while we go banging away at foreign nations with abandon and even celebratory élan. We can’t complain about the untrustworthiness of our young when our own bankers, congressmen, insurance companies, and financial advisors rob us blind and then ask to be bailed out, forgiven, and reelected. We have to sit at the table with the youth of our nation and change and grow as much as we are asking them to change and grow. Through this dialogue we have to learn from them as we expect them to learn from us. We have to give up some control, some money, and most of our connection to a dissipating image of the past.
    The young people are the only ones who can take care of this world.... We need to make an absolute commitment to them.

    The process of this step is to begin questioning our beliefs. For instance:
    Recently a conservative candidate for president sang a rousing chorus of bomb, bomb, bomb . . . bomb, bomb Iran , a takeoff on a pop song of the middle ’60s. This bastardization of a forty-year-old song made clear my fear that so many people in power live, and thrive, in the past.
    Maybe in the ’50s and ’60s brute force was a workable method of curtailing nuclear proliferation; maybe we could attain our ends by flexing our muscles in those long-ago days. Looking at this stance from today’s standpoint we might have been wrong even then, but today there is no question that our hegemony over weapons of mass destruction is over. Within a decade countries like Togo and Luxembourg will have the wherewithal to produce and deliver these terrible products.
    If we follow these archaic templates of balance, the world will suffer from it. We need diplomacy and