The Diaspora of the Educated Young-uns

I am fleeing from an invisible pursuer.  Down back-alley ways, through abandoned buildings, and into the wild.  Over snow capped mountains in the land of stone, though deserts in a mini-van, and back to my city-side origins: only to run again.  I am running with a million like-minded individuals.  Or more?  Who knows?  Because the herd scatters in every direction.  There is no unity.  No unity except in the idea that movement will cleanse us.  That only the traveler is pure.  A heard scattered over the globe in ones and twos and threes.  Fleeing, always fleeing from that invisible pursuer.  Because to put down roots is to fall victim, is to give up.  So, on we run, run on, run on.  A global village of vagabonds, gypsies glimpsed for an instant only, and then?  We are gone, off to the next destination.

And forever pursued by that invisible monster that bounds after each and every one of us on velvet feet.  Creeping closer, every year creeping closer, until one by one we we slip into the rhythm of the dream.  A house, a car, a wife, a family.  Responsibility takes us in her firm suburban grasp, and we smile back at her in family portraits snapped after church on Sunday.

It is a trap.  It is a prison.  But this is not to say that I don't one day want the "finer things in life."  A house?  I'll build it myself.  A car?  How about a truck and a motorcycle.  A wife?  Yes, please, I'll take a couple.  Children?  Sure.  Sure.  In fact, I've probably already got a couple running around this wide wonderful world.

But when?  When can I see myself settling into this comfortable groove?  I'm 25 and staring down the gun-barrel of 30.  I can hear the velvet footfall of responsibility padding behind me in the dark.  But I cannot turn toward her yet.  Not yet.  There is too much to do.  There is too much to see.  And there will always be too much to do, too much to see. So I run.

It was Robert Lewis Stevenson who said: " I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to move."  And how many today can agree with this?  How many ten years ago, or ten years before?

So I run.

Along with my colleagues: the college educated masses who don't see exactly how they will fit into the world wide web of work.  Together we run, in different directions, the spider legs of responsibility tip-toeing toward us.  It is a diaspora of the educated young-uns.  Like a gumball machine shattered with an axe, shattered as the commencement speaker salutes the gown-clad graduates and wishes them "godspeed and good luck."  Now run, goddamn it, run.

We are a new generation nameless.  We want to reject the ideas of our mothers and fathers, but what the fuck do they believe in, anyway.  Were they as open-minded as we?  Back in their hay-day, back when there was something worth fighting for.  Don't we reject the same ideals as did they?  Interesting questions, but surely we are different.

We are a new generation nameless.  And there is not yet a buildings-roman, a coming of age story, that describes us.  For we have not yet come of age.  It does not happen now in your teens or early twenties.  It is a process that unfolds over the following years.  And I pray to God that this coming of age is the most intricate masterwork of origami ever produced.  May the unfolding never cease.  May the growth continue ad infinitum. 

I will run, I will flee.  Until finally, snared by the lovely hand of that invisible monster, I take my wanderings in a new direction.  And that path may very well lead to the greatest adventure of all..  But for now I drift aloft, a proclaimed member of the diaspora.  I will spread myself thin so that the wind can catch me.  There is purity in movement, and away we go.

Now run, goddamn it, run.