You know how the hippie movement had some good intentions, some pretty great music, some awesome drugs, but overall was pretty self-involved and on a lot of levels mildly infuriating?
Here’s the new iteration: Forts & Inbetween. When I first saw this, I got so angry I almost went blind at my desk. Few things tempt me on a primal level to physical violence against all inanimate objects around me. But when I take I breath, I see what they’re trying to do. I still think they’re a bunch of white kids who want to build little kid forts to seal themselves off from life’s complexities, regress to childhood, and pretend that they’re the most specialist thing in the world just because they are who they are for a little while longer.
But at least the hippies had drugs. I bet these kids have pot, too, but I bet it’s shitty pot because they don’t know the difference. It’s all entitled, consumer-based, media-oriented, self-reflexive fantasy that culminates in some pretty outstanding facile intellectualism.
It’s going to be a real bummer when it comes time to take a stand against real struggles, because we’ll have to find hope and allies from a generation in which a large swath like to juggle (poorly), own accordions but can’t play them, and think they live in The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
And then there will be the onslaught of the generation after us.
This has to be a joke right? That or some kind of viral promotion created by a pro-arson group, because mostly this video just wants me to set these idiotic forts on fire.
Look, I’m all for the helping and people looking to effect positive change, but why the forts? I hated those things as a kid and don’t want to sit in one with a bunch of people making a kind of B.O. community sweat lodge. Also, I don’t see these things taking hold in, say, East St. Louis.
On a side note, I recently read that most of the people in depression-era hobo-villages (or Hoovervilles, as they were called) were around 16 to 22 years of age. Kids, basically. Like these guys. Hopefully it won’t happen again but, hey, give it some time and it might.
Finally, now that I think about it, you know how many people live in horrific poverty at this very moment and HAVE to live in shantytowns made of tents? Fuck this.
This has to be the apex, right? This is that thing that is so far sideways that rest of us stop and go “I can’t go over there.” And then we turn around, leaving the wierdos to be lost, like that kid at the end of the sandlot that got really into the ’60s. I hate forts. I hate the people who make them, and how those people view the world. This needs to be reblogged. This is a movement.
