Latchkey generation unveils what’s going on

OPINION:

What’s going on?

There are protestations and cries everywhere, and while they’re in separate silos, each is marked urgent care.

Religious freedom. Social justice. Economic justice. Criminal justice. Human rights. LGBTQ rights. Abortion rights. Women’s rights. Police reform. Health care rights. Equal rights. Voting rights. Civil rights. Adoption rights. Employment rights. Police reform. No police.

That’s the short list, of course, but you get the picture.

America is topsy-turvy.

While each issue on the short list has been tended to by hell and high water since America’s first birthday, voices around the globe are questioning whether America even got any of the issues right.

A proud nation that preaches democracy everywhere, did we go too fast?

Let’s not get bogged down in ancient history, OK. The heady days of the ’60s suffice as a starting point, when hippies, yippies, riots, conservatism, assassinations, integration and segregation, communism, sexual liberation, the disgruntlement with the Vietnam War, and the push for civil and voting rights clashed with the establishment.

Now, their children’s children are anti-establishment, stirring up chaos and partaking in violence in big cities from the Pacific Northwest to the East Coast.

The latchkey generation’s kids — reared on the importance of a college education, independence, video games and divorced or single parents — want to up their dukes against the establishment (a door opened by th internet and, ahem, Bernie Sanders). They might not be intellectual enough to distinguish socialism from liberalism and progressivism, but they don’t need to. We’ve already promoted them as leaders of America’s future.

I could be making an oversimplification, but how else do you explain the “cancel culture,” whose “BHive” swipes at Beyonce for wanting to be in the next “Black Panther” film or suggestions that Idris Elba could portray James Bond or statues of Britney Spears should replace Robert E. Lee?

I’m not making this up.

The children born to the latchkey generation want a reason — any reason — to be released from purgatorial COVID-19 lockdown. Teens and young adults were given free reign to play hooky from school for protests — and parents went along with the schools’ permissive policies. And they know they risk being arrested for breaking curfew but do not care. Police will let them go, and they know it.

Their older relatives might recite the words to Marvin Gaye’s lamenting: “Mother, Mother / there’s too many of you crying / Brother, brother, brother / there’s far too many of you dying.”

But the title of the song by Gaye, a D.C. native, was “What’s Going On” with no question mark.

The anxious generation marking time with protests and violence — regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic and political persuasion — must add a question mark, however.

Police are being told to stand down during marches and protests, and too many people means no one is in charge.

Change is sometimes hard to swallow, regardless of money, status and color. But people always focus on safety and pocketbook issues the closer they get to Election Day.

2020 will be no different, as Marvin Gaye’s other apropos protest song, “Inner City Blues,” which laments what happened in and to big cities after the ’60s hell-raising.

Americans voted with their feet and moved to the suburbs and outer suburbs, and their money followed — except back then they needed to be near a bank. This time around their money and their jobs are portable.

That’s what’s going on — period.

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.