an open letter to the children's children . . . by vince It is long overdue, but I share with you my heartfelt insight into what is to come for those of us who are trying to live outside this system of hate that leaves the poor homeless and the arm's merchants wealthy. i wish i could sit down with each one of you of you and express my true enthusiam for what is to transpire in the year's to come.....when time permits contact me and let's do exactly that. When I was sixteen years old my friends and I took our lunch money, skipped school and took a trolley to downtown Pittsburgh. The streets of Pittsburgh were filled with thousands of people protesting the war in Vietnam, to my surprise there were no hippies but working class and business people in conserative dress expressing their outrage. Here in the tri-state, West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania over four hundred young men on the average of nineteen years old were being taken out of the United States to kill over 3.4 million Vietnamese people, over 58,000 Americans lost their lives in this tragic war. That was over thirty years ago... For some reason the dream of our generation is being given a second chance. As I traveled from one part of this country to another I met people who were struggling against the ecological ravaging of the logging industry, young people from Food Not Bombs, whose public feedings are making a statement about a system that leaves 5 to 6 million (size of a small nation) abandoned to the streets and wayside. More certainly I met people who wanted to disengage from a system of self and money and consumerism. We are on the verge of a rebellion that would even surprise those of us who have seen it coming. It will be like the 60's in that it will be a civil war except this time we will win. ...there will come a day and it is in fact here, that we will take the bricks from the ruins of the old order and the mortar from the new and we will build a new world where there is no more poverty, no more war, no pollution and no one will ever be lonely again. we will build a new world where every tear is wiped away... for now the 60's seems like a fractured fairy tale, and that you have inherited a failed dream...the 60's is not a time, it is not empty nostagia, it is a place. in that we will find the way to complete what was undone by the killing of our leaders and leaving us with only a well marketed youth rebellion. like the 60's there will be a civil war, except this time we will win. we will see our scars turn into brilliant stars that will help navigate us out of these tubulant waters and cloudy night... In this era of love hope and rage there will be people who approach you talking about hate fear and violence. They will be talking about arms struggle, class wars, and violent revolution... listen to them. There is a part of their passion that is courageous, but their methods and weapons are ineffctive and will only add more hate to the universe. When I was young people talked of the violent overthrow of the government, those were empty words and the depth of commitment was revealed when only in a few short years they became a part of the very establishment that they rebelled against. These are your parents. Many would like you to beleive that you are product of a failed dream. That your rebelion is nothing less than an adolescent rite of passage, but in your impatience with the chaotic injustice that surrounds you are the seeds of change. What is there left to do at the end of a world except to build a new one. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania March, 1996 Vincent Scotti Eirene (notowar@telerama.com) last updated 9 - 12 - 2001