…that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial…
Paul Graham Putting Ideas Into Words November 2022
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The last time (2002) the G-7 elite capitalists met here I was a youthful middle aged man. Now I’m a senior citizen and cynical, I know, but still youthfully caring and hoping.
Seasons change, history repeats, as people remain the same.
I’m old, tired and I can make a prediction. Bright eyed student protestors from all over the continent will arrive, (for June 2025) leaving behind their ability to document, footnote and explain to the rest of us what’s so bad about the G-7, or whatever it is they are protesting. When they leave here, the good people of our city will remain just as ignorant as all our sister cities on this continent. No candle here will light a spreading flame. Just like last time.
In my day, students would have their knuckles rapped if they couldn’t “write-and-think” clearly. But today no young protester will give the newspaper an “essay to the editor.” Last time it was ordinary old locals, not the student “best and brightest,” who put on an evening information-sharing at a space at the local university.
I am reminded of the curmudgeonly Harlan Ellison writing reviews of television, even though he he called it “chewing gum for the eyes.” One day, during the years of the “generation gap,” the networks were going to allow the youth to present their case to the short haired, hardhat wearing, regular Americans, the “silent majority” as President Nixon called them. Harlan got excited. But then he was crushed. The show opened with a girl in a mini skirt gleefully saying something silly and swinging a mallet on a huge gong. The entire show was full of glee… but empty of content…
Concepts such as capitalism weren’t even defined, let alone explained. This was back when, according to some, “ the average housewife doesn’t know the word ecology.” After that episode, they still didn’t. No wonder the brave new world promised by sixties didn’t arrive. Or it did, but only from the sustained efforts of the middle aged.
The only “protest prose” the last time the G-7 was here was when a line of youth wrote letters on their bums and mooned the crowd. I no longer recall what they wrote, but I know what I wrote: I observed the high cost of hosting the summit could be mitigated, if only from lower security costs, if they held the summit on an army base on the flat safe prairie. These bases, as it happens are built to suddenly expand to WWII population levels. Partly by having ample room between the existing structures—so I was told when stationed with the Canadian Airborne Regiment at CFB Greisbach in North Edmonton. But the elite would rather bill us for their luxurious mountain views with tree-masked approaches.
As a young soldier, my peers were as romantic and gleeful as any long haired guys—but we were also professional. I remember asking my chaplain why a long haired student in high school was so anti-army, so anti-marching: the boy told me he resented having to hold his instrument to his chin before stepping off in his legion marching band, a band he joined to go to Germany. My chaplain asked, “What instrument did he play?” I said the cymbals. “There’s your answer. Had he been a motivated musician, he would have been motivated for the discipline.” Later I too went to West Germany—gleeful at being stationed there—as a working man, not some aimless kid.
Years later many youth just like the ones at the G-7—now short haired—set up tents on the city plaza to “Occupy Wall Street” after the 2008 melt down. On the very last day, when the tents were taken down, and reporters, remembering their own youth, sympathetically held up their pens and microphones and cameras… They recorded no last words of any significance at all… And reported this in a half page feature. This when the central public library was at the corner of the plaza.
In my day, we had young folks like in the radical novel Vida, folks willing to do the tedious work of researching corporations.
I would warn students studying things like history and communication: if you would protest effectively, then you must become willing to apply such learning.
Youth is wasted on the young, I know, but your learning is lifelong. I hope, as you age, you will keep your ideals, as have your favourite teachers, local journalists, and old bloggers.
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Sean Crawford
in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains,
May,
2025
Footnote: In paragraph four, when I said write-and-think, I was inspired by a Paul Graham essay where he said, in my words, that even talking to a genius is not as fruitful as the thinking you do while writing in your own backyard garden. (In his October essay “Writes and Write-Nots”) I get a kick out of Graham because even though he’s independently wealthy, and could spend the rest of his life on the beach by day and partying with millionaires by night, he nevertheless struggles to compose essays that benefit the rest of us.
His latest is on the correlation between good writing and good ideas.
