There was a scramble in a lot of ways!  Hold on I'll recount some bits.

  John 20:28. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and My God.

  Not sure that it had occurred to people that the Baby Boomer generation was huge; large and in charge!  And they were, since their births, the economic engine of the mainstay.  As the Greatest Generation mixing back into civilian population, the Baby Boomers started growing up and navigating a world that had nuked, and that had like the carpenter fixing up the carpenter's wife's house last, NOT RETREATED.  The fighting went on in the Pacific for quite some time after Europe started painting some orderly driving signs post-Victory.

  Hitler and the damages wrought were world-mind-blowing.  And in the way the hardcore military people next marched to deal with "Korea" and world diplomats and social service people did trauma recovery work, the healing that needed to happen was on a smithereened human and sense of humanity.

  Vietnam was more dealing with a world perforated on capitalism/communism than any kind of decision to hate, to enemy.  What the little heroic nation found was that in foreign affairs....the line is razor thin.

  After Vietnam there was a mini-version of Allies/Axis re-study.  Back tracking to Colonial in order to not sieve what gains democracy and autocracy (?) had made in rebuilding nation-selves and ideology.

  Culturally in many ways there was a game of freeze tag.  But for the "radicals" rocking the boats, mostly to convey stuff like....racism and religious creed....as an intellectualism grappled with its own existence/absence it was also called upon in the way a child who has been orphaned may or may not feel drawn to a someone to trust....maybe the pastor might have an answer....maybe someone else's grandma might have an extra cookie and story of the old world.

  Fashion and food and music and television was given out in black and white first.  Comedy was cautiously prepared and delivered like sermons at Mass or water pills for "heart problems".

  In the late 1950's and 1960's, in mass or group reality, "counter-culture" was as proportionally enormous as it was in Galileo's day when being deemed "heretic" also had personally epic consequence.

  We moved as a spongy number one big hand defending the right to like a sports team, gradually into; a kid started a wave of hands up and down in a stadium....Can we do it too Ma?????

  Get ready, our mother would give fair warning to the younger kids.

  At homes from events and gatherings people needed to "process" what things were meaning.

  "Gen X" was only producing a certain amount of truck drivers per high school graduation year; likewise accountants; the same with enlisting.  Grocery stores, department stores, schools, and other "settled" institution as infrastructure were careers and lifetime (sometimes generational) professions and trades.

  Meanwhile travel was increasing; ways people could live in other countries were blooming; intangibles like advertising and "pop culture" were beginning to go faster and faster....

I gotta get ready for work

   We chased them into Kuwait to just say no to that.

  So as a Stateside Correspondent, I asked, 

  Why did the action seem so small?

  An off-the-record military person first told me the question would be relayed up.  Then tried to explain 

              proportion.

  Something else in the tightly wound retroactively-named-formula: crisis, action, crisis, action.

   On popular music these days I hear a lot of

  I think

  anthems

  Reminds me of George Washington's low point before Independence.  People rallied in their own ways as they grappled with how things were piling up on the scales.

  When the bones are good

  Poets couched criticism to keep a low profile; churning sentiment, the ocean spray plonked words like skeleton keys.  There was a shift from romance, let's just write about love and shit, into

  There were complicated morale issues.  Fur trappers couldn't be bothered with Cotillion clothing measurements.  Spies were ambiguous.  The compassing, canon-toting ragged uniformed, tired legs couldn't be anything but soldiers.  Town squares were still forts but with outlets like pubs and taverns there was, on the sly, increasing chatter like off-track-betting.

  The start up nation went through a bunch of different flag designs.

  People were eating a lot of onions.

  There was and wasn't a general sense of united.

  Back when our poets were trying to convince us that we didn't start the fire psychologists were pushing hard for personal responsibility.  There was a shift from having become a pop rocks sugar-coated warring culture, abusive as all get out, BUT

  We couldn't seem to decide on united beyond blue jeans.

  I was traveling a lot.  My touchstone was my mother's take on Olympic ice skating.  For my reams and reams of wrestle, she'd keynote as the calm continuum, a master wordsmith, a brilliant commentator because she just uttered that truth;

  That truth that is standing before you in an understated formal-wear version of Glory.

  That one's under a lot of pressure, she'd get me to look up from reading and see a Russian trying to out point another.  I'd notice whole scene on screen and sink back into my nautilus shell.

  Oooooo, she'd wince as a Korean slightly turned an ankle.  Aaaaah, she'd be joyous for the dance-skating couple who'd gone to college and delivered pizza to get to the pinnacle.  They don't give up, I'd hear her say as I was reading a paragraph on shredded torsos and landmines.

  Some shifts are sea change.  Some wars come to people.  Other shifts are subtle.  Sometimes people slide and/or backslide into warring.  There is a continuum even when there is obliteration.

  The Serb "demands" were nothing new in the formulas of culture/warring that had developed as the Cold War hung like a blimp no one would bust.  Hostages, embassy take-overs, the tit for tat reporting turned jungle of information running craggy like Vietnam's peaks and valleys, just too lates in sat reports and phospherous residue....even people not directly involved with "war" had become accustomed.  In the 1980's and early 90's the TV magazine show 60 Minutes was a Reader's Digest version of the world.

  Likewise the photograph by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos (page 243, Problem), "Dr. Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, exhumes the blindfolded skull of a Kurdish teenager from a mass grave in Erbil, northern Iraq, December 1991" is the equivalent to a WPA image of woman holding rusty-bottom bucket.

  People "vegged out" in front of episodes of Ring the Bell as we had Gilligan's Island.  Without red, white, and blue balloons an America created a parallel universe where it was dropping into a USO tent.  Like the parents who bought toys by the cartfull and dry cleaned Granny's afghan every spring, a virtual safe space was put into place before the Internet and social media.  And the TV networks were able to pinpoint hacks into the TV tubes, like Hamas in ski masks targeting widest audience during Sunday evening Disney programming.  Spliced it from where?????  Uniformed AV people rank and filed with light bulb electronics.

  What blanched Bob Simon's tan was the tensions like earth quake pressing news people to believe "they" should be able to prevent everything.  "They" should be the "intervention".  That, and, in a feld swoop, partly televised, there was the root-shift....

  "Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic was not dabbling or using a petty landgrab to send a political signal; he was taking a huge chunk of internationally 'protected' territory and challenging the world to stop him" (preface, xiii).

The octopus, or,

 This is complicated thinking and not just for young people.

  Real, Heart of Darkness type stuff.

  Our country, western tradition's core.  It's how we survive the nations ascending and descending.

  It's not burning each other up as witches.  And not trading Capitalism for corruption and crime.

  It's classic tales of new people per diem, confrontation, and engagement as collisions occur in the universe.  It's start-ups and adoptions and bramble, oh my!

  How's that working for you?  The question sort of echoed and barely made it into my been-at-a-concert ears.  New shoes, wrecked.  Memorial Day white pants, blotched with red wine and dirt samples of contemporary culture.  Apparently, I needed oxygen.  I'd parked my wilting self on a knee wall close to an exit but not all the way to an ocean of a parking lot.  The older couple with tanks of the stuff on pull carts broke open a crispy new lead, hose and hooked me up.

  Do you think I'm dying?

  We all dying sooner or later Missie.

  The words of the man made it over the wall.  The absence of anything and noise wall.  My brain realized the man had made great effort to push the words in the direction of me.  Me!  I'm still me!

  Don't talk, it works better, the woman patted my knee.

  I had sworn to God via my mother never to go to a Greatful Dead concert.  To date I had managed to live nineteen years of 100% truth at the end of the day.  A turn towards journalism from novel-thinking though

  At?  My father held the phone in the air for about four minutes while my mom decided if she was going to talk to me.

  Not really at.

  Near.

  Did you hear me?

  Is this long distance?  My father inquired of the collect call.

  What's this about?  An angry-sounding sibling picked up another phone and coloneled.

  Never mind.  I'll see you all someday.  Click.

  The oxygen tanks on wheels had left condensation tracks away.  The predawn sky was taking on light and cloudshapes were chunks of darker charcoal not moving very fast.

  She and then they had promised I wouldn't be a revolutionary.  I know nothing about Russia, I'd reiterated.  Berlin is not in Russia, a thickly accented person said from the front seat without turning around.

  Face half beat red from not moving.

  THERE YOU ARE LARA

  I bursted, both ends.

  She blew out a breath and without breaking eye contact threw me the sweater that had been over her briefcase arm and she said, 

  Near an airport

  Found you

  I sucked in all my breath to stop the bursting, wiped my face with the sweater and then sat on it long enough to wrap the sleeves around my waist.

  Now will you work with me?

  In the City I got a telegram from my mother:

  Your. Grounded.  Don't.  Come.  Home.  Until.  You.  Figure.  Out.  Your.  Your.  Future.  Love.  Mom.

  In the orchestra playing as the wall came down over years I played strings with Didion.

  When I bumped into an old French friend on a dancefloor in Montreal, half on purpose, and blurted out her pal-name in the flash of recognition, she made dance moves, wagging her finger, shaking her head, mouthing No, nooooo, no; hands clasped hiding the steeple, then shaking tremble, dropping arms to sides and wiggling, away.  A couple decades later people were trying to relay such times to younger people the way a grandpa will demand the wrench, god dammit, the wrench.  Just had the thing fixed, give it!!  Yep.  Now.  Here.  We are.  "Feeding the pigs together."

  It will still be cheaper here, a foreign-accented man said to me in the aisle of a home improvement store in June 2020.

  "America's promises, which Serb gunners took seriously at first, bought Sarajevans a brief reprieve.  But they also raised expectations among Bosnians that they were safe to live again.  As it turned out, the brutality of Serb political, military, and paramilitary leaders would be met with condemnation but not with the promised military intervention" (Problem, preface).

  Not a genocide then.  That was part of the big tidal plain floods all along.  And hot spot activity just splashed all over pop culture.  Outside of records' offices nothing was categorical.  Then digi-this-and-that eliminated boundaries twixt wars and revolutions and economies and "styles" like Olestra taking the healthy gut materials out of a body with the oily discharge. 

  All the coming and going without language and law enforcing place and people blurred even nation-builders into the smoking holes of 9112001.

What's on trial?

   "But American resolve soon wilted"....

  Be it resolved ?  The internet needed a Constitution or an Accord...

  "Saving Bosnian lives was not deemed worth risking U.S. soldiers or challenging America's European allies who wanted to remain neutral"....

Why the word "risk"?

What's risky about this?  Break it down teleologically.

Why?  A fifth column journalism question that helps define _________.

"Clinton and his team shifted from the language of genocide to that of 'tragedy' and 'civil war,' downplaying public expectations that there was anything the United States could do"....

Break it down militarily.

  Language as form.  Language as place.

  Projectiles are not "just language".

  Immediately part of the problem with non-Parliamentary party politics had to do with rank and file, subordination and wit.

  Tarring and feathering was more of a popular version of military command.  So few were "hung for treason" because the Constitution gave equal weight.  In 1848 differing "republicans" were running around claiming territory.  In Russia there was "revolution".  The world's ruckous fighting was over flag and favoritism.  Degrees of violence were still more like Shakespeare's sarcasm.

To the mat????

 Let's get ________ on their asses!

Uppercut!!

You can't tackle a herd of buffalo; tact?

Everybody's different, so we have "general rules of thumb".

  A university chapter of STD was brainstorming as if we'd taken a campaign job.  Pondering "appeal".  

As in advertising should have appeal.

Teleological, and don't say asses.

Change is gonna come.

Rule of thumb?  Is that Swedish or something?  How do we explain it to the Chinese?

Like a canister of obnoxious sound; there was something blown,

Indicating: a shift, politically

In time of season

The vigor with which the young people "manned up" was like Big Sur waves.

  A creative started shooting bean bags out of a hand-cranked pipe.  GET AWAY!!!!!  She hollered.

  All is WAR, a calm, fat walleted Republican kid was relaying from having been home for dinner.

  WHY????? Another kid in an amalgam of clothing collected from spending the night in the homeless camps yell-asked.

  Is that a frat tee?  A love interest inquired from the fringe of my Jesus bubble.

  Sigma Tau Delta, it's an English thing.

  A graduate student was brushing clumps of hair onto a restaurant bar towel.

  "NO. No.  No."

  Despite the ambassador's plea of 1000; He...no...killed more than 7000.

"The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred" (preface, xv).

1848.  The United States of America.

Chapter 16

   If our great and grandparents were the Greatest Generation for securing the freedoms of democracy, our parents' generation were genius at business.

         Iacocca and the Japs.

A man falls

A shell lands on a downtown market

"The graphic images from this massacre generated widespread American sympathy and galvanized President Bill Clinton and his NATO allies.  They issued an unprecedented ultimatum, in which they threatened massive air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs if they resumed their bombardment of Sarajevo or continued what Clinton described as the 'murder of innocents'" (preface, "A Problem From Hell").

  For us the decade of the 1990's had started with as much immense hope as there was misery in the world.  Israel and America's political leaders seemed to be hearing us"

"us", a quickly burning-out "bunch"

compared to the boomers in

size, doggedly chanting for 

World Peace, like we'd caught 

an unnamed virus from Pope 

John Paul.  The hid-their-lights 

when necessary "activists" and 

"progressives" to Cold War 

stalemate-cooled-icy-vicious-behind-the-scenes had chained themselves to trees and the radicals rafted into subtle impact zones to be, sometimes not so subtlely.  Greenpeace, Gorilla Girls, 28 Days and the pursuit of drug-doing as lifestyle: Grunge, were statementing some sort of group Will & Testament.  Plenty of us waffled between ascetic and just "individual" getting into the microsegments of time as 24/7 kid-pay jobs replaced education system babysitting in our lives. Strategists warned of shifts in the balance of power but the Boomer engine repeatedly proved outboard motor to post-Vietnam stasis in D.C.

  Don't rock the boat generally meant not to jeopardize the group buffet. 

Margaret Thatcher in Moonboots.  It was just one of those sayings amongst creatives sometimes seeing politics taking cues from popular.  Our agers came up with dozens of soundy expressions to indicate gear-shift.  They said, he said, she said, it:

  Trying to "go with the flow" sometimes meant hanging on every word, more often ignoring, and then increasingly just be in the moment.  For those of us not wanting to fling ourselves off bridges with bungee cords or otherwise, just out of focus, slightly out of frame served as a cocktail: ingredients--Constitution + Living It.

  Loosed from the moors and morals by tribal viking shields focused/focusing on 1. Keeping up with the Joneses 2. Glossy glossy frus frus ode du toilet and talcum powder 3. Go west young people; ours produced.  Mostly to not suprafanfare but Oprah gave shout outs.

  For every pair of mom jeans, a cut out butt section started a recycle project.

  Their ALWAYS older than us, young women rageboasted of twin beauty mothers.  When ya coming home, I don't know when had been a lullaby.  Pass the what?  Pass the popcorn was knowing, I can change me, but

  In the days and days after September 11th there was just as much shock at where does this leave our group as there was at rogue terrorists who could be so

  Part of the literature is peering through a telescope at a planet post world on fire; a lot of it was suggestions on what to do; most exuded both uncertainty and forged-into what did you expect.  Some measure of mass consciousness had incrementally sunk.  Not unlike in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the what does it matter now obliterated genuine optimism regarding redemption.  Like Ossama Bin Laden had caught a gold fish in a bottle and sent a message back:

This is your culture on crack, 

The terrorists put out the cigarette butts.

  Stillness.

  A small footpath through the ashes.

  Another tower.

  Hamas gunning down concert goers.

  Another village wiped away.

  1995.  Buick put out a fifty year since 1945 commemorative TIME magazine issue.  "The hour was late, all was chummy good will when Molotov remarked that at last he could tell the others what had happened to those Poles."