Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll

It's Later Than You Think

It's Later Than YouThink Don't look back (Idi Amin may be gaining on you), but the seventies are behind us. Sometime during 1976 they just faded out. Historians will recall the seventies as nasty and brutish, but mercifully short. The eighties, contrary to a lot of people's gloomy expectations, are going to be different. Not fun and games, by any means, but an active, energetic decade that we can really live in, not just live through. How do I know? Well, to explain I have to try to convey what life has been like these many months in occupied New York. The city, as you probably know—some of you may even care—is broke. We are being governed by a junta of bankers who do not look kindly on such decadent luxuries as police and fire protection, public education, and a functioning transit system. Without massive federal aid, which does not appear to be forthcoming, our economic future looks pretty grim. Furthermore, the sludge that hit Long Island's beaches last summer is undoubtedly lurking out there ready to strike again. And the weather has been terrible. In short, New Yorkers have every reason to be totally demoralized. 76 Ifs Later Than You Think Yet mysteriously, the spirit in this city is better, the energy level higher, than it's been in years. I first realized this around the time of the Bicentennial. I had fully expected the Bicentennial to be a depressing experience. The official booster bullshit was embarrassing; so was the unimaginative whining of the People's Bicentennial Commission, the left's only countereffort. Where were the Yippies, now that we needed them to organize a Festival of Life in San Clemente, or something? But by the weekend of the Fourth I discovered that I was not depressed at all. Along with most of my cynical radical friends, I was turned on by the Tall Ships, but even more by a new electricity in the air. It seemed as if every unemployed folk singer, magician, and chamber-music ensemble in the city was performing on the street, attracting lively crowds. People radiated a secret solidarity, a communal grin that translated, "Don't let the bastards get you down!" After that I began to notice how many people were saying things like "A year ago I was bored, nothing was happening, now I'm involved in this project and that relationship, my life is coming together again—don't get me wrong, I know we're in the middle of a depression. ..." I also noticed that at a time when I would have expected the more footloose members of my generation to start deserting New York like rats leaving the Titanic, people who had left were coming back! "I don't know," they would say when I asked. "I was getting tired of San Francisco/Washington/Boston. New York seemed like the right place to be." I agreed, but I wasn't sure why until I caught on about the eighties. New Yorkers are justly reputed to be tough-minded survivors. But when they are true to their best selves, they refuse to settle for mere survival—they believe in survival with elan. In the seventies what we refugees from the sixties euphemistically called survival was really more like shell shock. Here we were, bravely marching into the New Age when all of a sudden we found ourselves on our asses, wondering what hit us. Under those circumstances anyone who didn't commit suicide or move to Florida and become an 77 O U T O F T H E V I N Y L D E E P S orange was counted a survivor.* In the eighties that title will be reserved for those of us who can recover our wind, our fight, and our sense of humor. And I'm convinced that New York, which has a long tradition in such matters, has already begun leading the recovery. I even have a nomination for the first eighties culture hero: the unknown guerrilla who recently stalked the sidewalks of Greenwich Village planting tiny red flags in the piles of dogshit. Note that the eighties are as different from the sixties as from the seventies. The eighties are a decade of maturity rather than youth, of experience rather than innocence. You have to have been through the sixties to truly appreciate the eighties...