I’ve written before on the important generational change that is taking place right now in the USofA and how important it is through this election cycle:

Generations
Generations: Institutionalized
Generations: Do the Right Thing
Generations: Empire

In addition, I’ve written about how terrible our leadership has become – not just stupid, but arrogantly stupid and incapable of recognizing and promoting real talent due to competitive pressures at the top of the vast American Empire:

Britest Bulbs

What does this mean for the next generation, and what they will inherit? What lies ahead for the generations born after the Civil Rights Act now that they are becoming the leadership of this nation?

It looks pretty bleak. If you think about the mess we’re in, it doesn’t take too long to realize that what has to happen is nothing short of a complete re-invention of the USofA from the top to the bottom. That sounds like one Hell of a lot to accomplish; nations like Germany and Japan weren’t able to re-invent themselves until they were completely flattened and destitute.

But not the USofA. We re-invent ourselves constantly, one curious mind at a time. It’s what made us what we are and it will make us whatever we will be. What’s curious about the re-invention process, however, is that despite being constant it’s also experience tremendous waves of innovation after tremendous upheaval. Our history is measured out by periods where terrible times gave way to completely new worlds of opportunity. These have been:

The Jacksonian Era: Once the Bank of the United States controversy was ended and the common man clearly beat out the big money interests, the USofA made the transition from and East Coast mercantile society – one that took the raw materials of the continent and worked them a little for export – into a farming economy.

The Civil War: Once concluded, we created one nation with a strong central government, perfect for the gradual transition into an industrial economy.

1893: The Panic of 1893 was a genuine watershed, and marked the final stages of transition to an industrial economy ready to build itself up and take on the world.

The Great Depression: Coupled with WWII and the invention of the car, the nation started to strongly centralize into an industrial behemoth, one large factory.

1968: It’s hard to write the history of the world that we are in now, but after the upheaval of the 1960s the generation that inherited the USofA completed the transition to a financial empire that rules the world.

In each of these transitions, it was the new generation that survived the upheaval that made it all work. The nation emerged re-invented in a way that was hard for the previous generation to recognize, but fully responsive to the new generation and the times they lived in.

What transition are we undergoing now? The economic meltdown, total leadership crisis at all levels, and disastrous war will have to boil over into something more popular before we can say. Information technology is considered very cool right now, but unless it can be put to service connecting people to the world we are about to invent it won’t be all that important.

This isn’t about whatever we think is changing the world right now. This is about the wheel of history turning over one more time and how the people who find themselves caught on it respond. Those people are us, the citizens of the USofA. Something big is about to happen because something big has to happen; it’s always gone down that way before. How that happens is up to us, not our gadgets or our lumbering financial system or whatever petty political grudges we hold.

Our time is now, whether we like it or not. Are you ready?