LOOKING FOR A TIGER

With more than 6 billion of us jostling up against one another on this planet, imagine all the infinitely different ideas and inspirations, feelings and fears crackling out there. How in the world can anyone ever conceive and construct a single sense of all this complexity...?

Occasionally great institutions or leaders arrive and try. Religions and empires, popes and poets. But mainly conspiracists. Booming voices who find vast conspiracies in their world. Pharaohs did this about their enemies. Alexander did this with the Persian empire. Islam did this when they looked out at the infidels in Europe. European Christians did this with their Crusades into the Holy Land. Martin Luther did this with the infidel he saw in Rome. After WWII, both Washington and Moscow found conspiracies in the other

But there's another way to try making singular sense out of a complex world. Pick a generation, then turn it into a tiger you can give a name. America tried it in the 1920s, later in the 1960s, and now again in the 21st C. It's Youth!

In the 20s, F. Scott Fitzgerald best captured the young generation in his novels, and society rode this tiger of harness-busting swells and flappers. Until the Crash in 1929 busted the tiger into a debris of depression. In the 60s, the revolutionaries on the fields of Woodstock and in the streets of Chicago best captured the tiger. Until the disaster of Nixon's Viet Nam and venom. Now it's happening again. In an age when youth has learned how to work the new digital levers of power in the Social Media in order to change politics at home and ignite revolutions like Cairo abroad. As they do, old men in three-piece-suits in governments, banks and corporate offices wonder.

They see another tiger of youth roaring across the world. Hundreds of millions of young people -- with more dreams than jobs -- are trying to bare their claws of desire. Not for the first time, but each time the old men look for ways to make it the last time. Time alone will tell the tale.

And talking about tales, we've got this tiger just by the tail. How best to ride it? Probably that depends on our age. The old usually out-think or at least outlast the young in these affairs. On the other hand, it's good to remember that tigers like Alexander, Luther, Fitzgerald, Woodstock and Cairo were young. Very young...