We are the last ones. We’ve always been, even if we didn’t realize. We were the last ones in 1968, when, as youth, we threw ourselves against everything, whether that was just in our little town, just in our thoughts. We were the last ones in 1977, when the future collapsed over us. The last ones in the 1980s, stuck within, in the 1990s, in the 2000s... After us, work will be something completely different. After us, retirement will be no more. After us, nothing. Of all things that we have been, punk is the only one that really stuck with us, whether we wanted it to or not. We are the pensioners, and we aren’t finished yet.
Let us think. When we were young, we used to be the rebels. Why was that? Because we were students, there was the economic boom and no shortage of time or money. And if the latter was lacking, the former would make up for it. We used to devour books, magazines, debates. Even without the internet, we knew everything. And then, the world has crumbled behind us, like in a film a burning bridge behind a running fugitive. And so the youth, today, have to swallow their share of rebellion. They go to demos, they write slogans, and so on. But they don’t want to change life. They want to save their ass. Students, the youth, who have always been society’s most rebellious and innovative part, are today little more than its dark and depressive shadow, its panicky and anxious soul. If we are to count on them alone, on their energy that day by day is consumed by the pressure of work and the whirlpool of the future, we can be certain that every Cassandra will have her moment of glory.
So, who is left?
If the young are monkeys on a leash, who is left?
The last ones are left.
We are left.
Let’s look at ourselves. As it was then, more than then, we have time and money. We have a huge amount of time. They call it retirement. We might not have masses of money, but definitely enough. They call it retirement. They say that we are the last ones to enjoy it. Well, we are going to take this retirement, but we will wield it in our hands as if it were a hammer. We have twenty, thirty years of life ahead of us. We have a brain that’s rich and healthy. We still have hands to build, and fists to destroy.
Let’s look at each other. Are you sixty years-old, have you spent your life working as a teacher, have you paid off a mortgage and finally you have a place of your own? Well, your children will have nothing of this. The mortgage will eat their kidneys. They will spend retirement in a hospice, with a soft-boiled brain. But do not get anxious thinking about your children. Look beyond. Think of what you could do with that house of yours, with the money of your severance pay, with your pension. But most of all with your brain, still lively, with all you have learnt, with the people you have met, with the dreams you have nurtured. With your time. The last that is left. You understand. Now you can do all that you weren’t able to do when you were twenty. Back then, they told you that you had lost, that you had to get yourself sorted out, because you had too much to lose and not enough means. Because you had no choice. But this is no longer the case. All you have left to lose is boredom, and to burn you have your whole old age. There is little fear left, and if back then we used to say that the end in terror is better than a terror without end, all there is for us now is that end in terror. We might as well go and meet it among the flames!
What will you do with your afternoons, now that you have retired? You, the last privileged one, you that have freed yourself from work when you are still healthy, that now find yourself with your life back in your hands and a monthly cheque that covers you. Will you let your second life be most unbearable? There are legions of dead that don’t know they are. Don’t become one of them.
Go back home, gather all the things you don’t need and sell them. Go back home, to the guest-room, and smash the door. Your home, open it. Go out and look for the other retirees. For those who used to wear a balaclava, those who used to dream about California, those who, in the factories, used to sabotage machines. But also look for those onto whom life fell like acid rain, those who painted their rage with the colors of resignation, so as not to die. Get together. Let us get together. In the end times, the revolutionary class is us!
Let us go to schools and tell the children the truth about work, how it left us nothing but tired eyes, nothing but the rage of having burnt out our lives. Let us enter banks and tell the managers that one day they too will be like us, just with fewer friends, just with less dignity. Let us enter factories, where the workers no longer have enough oxygen to go on strike and let us stop the chain work with our bodies. Let us enter the airports from where they deport migrants, and let us occupy the runways. Let us go to the countryside, where they farm animals as if they were objects, and let us free them. Let us go to the supermarkets, get out with our wheelchairs loaded with loot and give it to the passersby! Let us switch on our computers, dust off our typewriters and let us get down on paper all that we have learnt. Let us leave a map of our lives, so that those after us won’t have to be lost in the same labyrinths!
And if we’ve got the space, let us open communes! If we’ve got the words, let us write manifestos! We will hang our best clothes on the doors of supreme fear and we will make a thundering rhythm out of our slowness. We will build with our hands a world where there is the elsewhere, not the far away, where there is time, not clocks, were people eat, sleep, and make love. Where people talk to each other rather than barking orders to one another. Where fear is just a shiver, that announces the best to come. We will leave to this world lives that have ended so incredibly, that in front of them death will feel shy.
Let each one of us follow the lines of flight that they like best. Those who have much to say, let them speak! They have voice, time and megaphones. Those who have fingers like guns, so livid that almost shoot by themselves, let them fire! The world is full of glass towers where bankers are begging for a storm to take them away from their hells of anti-depressants and overwork. Those who shiver with courage, let them dance the dance of struggle! Prisons are stubbled with fences that wait for nothing but being shaved down. The armed forces are a martyrdom of rifles ready to explode in their store-rooms, in their thousands. Those who have the arms of the builder and the fantasy of the architect, let them build the homes of the new world! Let us buy land, let us occupy it! Let us build the nest where our wildest dreams will take form. Those who still have the appetite of the mind traveller, let them get ready and start walking! There are more psychedelic planes in today’s sky than there ever were before.
But let us walk together, fire together, talk together, dance together! At sixty, there is nothing left but the future! If we want everything, we want it now. And of ourselves we will make beautiful ruins, as majestic as the forests that will cover us. On our highest towers the hawks will find rest and in our deepest caves the bats will dance their sabbath. And from our empty eye holes, as if at dawn, will break the morning that we always dreamed about. The future of the youth, of those who are left, will be our greatest triumph. Our greatest narcissism.
