From my observations, culture and progress run in cycles. Oppression pushes people down, like the readying of a spring. The fist wavers, and people leap up, taking all of society with them.

I'm not old enough to remember the 60s, but the general impression I've received from friends who were there describes a response to tightly laced culture, old social institutions in dire need of change.

The revolt collapsed through inexperience in the 70s, giving the bad guys another opening for return in the 80s. I remember crying with other students and teachers on learning Reagan had cut the funding for our magnet school in the midwest, a school a class of inner-city ghetto kids had viewed as the only positive thing in their lives, and a doorway into a future we never thought we could have. I remember lying awake every night, listening for warheads in the skies above, warheads we had been trained to know were inevitable. I remember the dank smell of bomb shelters and my continual waking nightmare: knowledge of nuclear vaporization at any moment. Massive deficits, armed conflicts, government corruption, destruction of infrastructure... the grind of a boot. People went crazy under the heat. The arts, without funding, still managed to thrive as an only outlet for the rage of a nation.

And suddenly, it all fell apart.

People woke up, talked to one another, realized the guys running our nation were a bunch of lying criminals pocketing our taxes, and moved the country back in a direction that fit an actual majority of lives. For a moment, the future looked as though it might come after all. Clinton showed up, a dark horse who took the bad guys by surprise, and got the US in the black for a change. Have you ever noticed how deficits rise under Republicans in modern America, but shrink under Democrats? How is it the NeoCons have successfully convinced the public the reverse is true?

And now, here in the mid 00s, it feels a great deal like the early 80s again. Nastier, grittier, a deeper divide, much more at stake... the same feeling of being broken and of the world about to come crashing down.

I'm betting we're following the curve: priming the spring again for a backlash, exponentially bigger than the last.