The Folksinger was singing one of the Older Bald Guy’s favourites: “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The idealistic simplicity of the lyrics normally invoked the feeling of lost innocence that he generally had when thinking of those long-ago halcyon days of Flower Power, Love and Peace. Today, though, the OBG was depressed. Even the strong brew of Brazilian Santos he was drinking, sweetened with Demerara sugar, did not dispel his mood. The problem was that he had made the mistake of turning on the radio when he was driving in to the Village Coffee House. The news headlines had featured yet another case of a child taking a gun to school and killing several classmates.
The Resident Radical was discoursing on the lack of motivation for youth in a capitalist society. He thought that work camps and education through labour should be mandatory each summer for all children between the ages of twelve and eighteen. The Poet with the Beret disagreed, saying that youth needed more understanding of life and beauty, through poetry, and much less of the popular culture force-fed them by commercial TV and radio.
The OBG sighed, and looked down at the few lines he had written on his steno pad:
A Random Act of Violence
Chimeric wisps
of anger
filter through
the fog of being.
Chance encounters,
choreographed
by Chaos,
put spark
to tinder-dry emotions
shaped by hormonal
hopelessness.
The sudden, explosive,
culmination
of a wasted life,
irrevocably,
irretrievably,
changes the lives of Innocents.
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