There’s something happening here. What it is is perfectly clear.

.

.

That Monterey concert was 42 years ago. By that time, Emmett Till had been dead a dozen years, three college students had been ambushed and murdered, Malcolm X and Medger Evers had been assassinated, men and women had died as Civil Rights martyrs and children had been blown up in church. Within a year, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy would be assassinated.

The passage of the major Civil Rights bills in the mid 60s opened the door for other reforms. The rights of farmworkers to organize unions, the rights of women, the mobilization to end the Vietnam War, the environmental movement, the anti-nuke movement, the rights of the disabled, gay rights and more would be advanced in the ensuing years.

Of the young adults who fought through the Depression and WWII, former news anchor Tom Brokaw dubbed them as the ‘Greatest Generation.’ The record of baby boomers, however, was also marked by a litany of great achievements. And the economy reflected their spending habits. And just as the front edge of that spending wave hit retirement age, the economy collapsed.

More than 15 million unemployed. That’s more than 2 million more than were unemployed in the worst Great Depression Year.

The failure of a major insurance firm snowballed through major banks that had assumed financial risks well beyond sustainability. Financial institutions from major brokerages, banks and insurance companies set up the fall that took down all those jobs. And their lobbyists have now hijacked our government efforts to regulate them back to lower risk levels, while their terrible decisionmakers rake in excessive bonuses.

Unlike the Great Depression, it’s not Dillinger and Bonnie Clyde robbing the banks that overspeculated. It’s the crooked banks robbing our federal treasury and the jobs of millions. 1 in 5 men aged 25 to 54 are unemployed today. Our government plans to counter that demonstrate a failure in Congress and more concern about budget deficits than the human and community toll of so many people out of work.

The one major program initiative that had the capacity to reduce future spending while alleviating a major need (whose escalating costs keeps threatening more in the middle class) was the healthcare insurance reform plan. Once again, after getting that amended so often to favor their businesses, insurance industry lobbyists have virtually killed the plan. Even if it passes, the mandates it contains will drive insurance company profits to new record levels.

The cost to taxpayers? Who cares?! The unemployed? Who cares?! Every Congressional Republican plus half a dozen Democratic senators remain the biggest roadblocks to healthcare insurance reform. But there’s plenty of blame to spread further around for the anemic response to the high unemployment. The White House, the Federal Reserve, major media outlets, major financial institutions deserve an enormous public rebuke for that.

But there’s another group pretty well insulated from the worst impacts, that didn’t exist in the 1930s. Retired seniors. Some from the Greatest Generation and some baby boomers look to survive this crisis with most of their assets and income intact. Though freedom and justice remain highly touted all around as the bedrock of our nation, expanded police and intelligence powers, secret prisons, torture and other unthinkable traits of repressive tyrannies are growing. And the other bedrock to our nation’s success, economic opportunity, is shrinking rapidly.

Lesser opportunities for Generation X and even lesser ones for Generation Y seem destined to lead to a Generation Z… for Zero. Is that really the culmination of the American Dream?

It certainly looks that way. The power brokers of extreme greed grow wealthier fastest if they keep our society fighting over partisan differences rooted in myths and insults. Within both major parties, there’s been further splintering exploited by those same greedy extremists.

The greatest void goes beyond the immediate financial distress, however. There’s an even greater moral void developing. Too many in our government will make no concession to the greatest need of all: the sustained well-being of the next generation and all the ones that follow.

Which leads to the only foreseeble solution remaining. The generations that got us through the Great Depression and everyy challenge since, through this current Great Recession, have to grab the reins again. Only this time, we won’t solve things by gathering a hundred thousand at the Capitol Mall.

It’s going to take millions of us, assembled wherever the greatest powers lie. If necessary we’ll have to march and shut down wall Street, march and shut down K Street, march and shut down those who don’t give a damn about our children at all. Maybe it’ll take a massive general nationwide strike - a massive work stoppage, to let them know they’ve gone too far.

March, strike and boycott. The proven tools that produce ethical social reforms. Steel yourself for it. It’s time to organize now to mobilize this year.

Unless, of course, Generation Zero is okay by you.

As the President warned Democrats in Congress yesterday:

“If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression — we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street — the result is going to be the same,” he said. “I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place.”

Middle class Americans, Obama said, “are more and more vulnerable, and they have been for the last decade, treading water. And if our response ends up being, you know, because we don’t want to — we don’t want to stir things up here, we’re just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don’t know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.”

After their performance in 2009, we can risk the next generations no more. Email and Paypal activism just isn’t enough. Weary or not, here we come.

If you need more moral incentive, consider these words and these.