The rising tide of change...

It rolls back, breaking at its own will, invoking its freedom and strength with every crashing wave, and it slowly rises and falls as the day turns to night and then back again.

Ah, the beautiful power of the tide...

After traveling into the Pacific Northwest, hiking 30 miles into the heart of the Northern Cascades in search of the spirit of Jack Kerouac, who spent 63 days of complete solitude up at the Desolation Fire Lookout in the summer of 1956 a few months shy of him becoming a household name, we were able to see the many factors that led to Kerouac's ascent towards the high water mark for the Lowell, Mass., product.

At this point in his life, Kerouac had spent the better part of a decade as a homeless rucksack, traveling the breadth of this nation, hitchhiking his way across the vast landscape of this country and down through Mexico City. The tide was slowly rising in his life, but it had yet to reach the crest of success he envisioned as he jumped from couch to couch, shady hotel room to train car, and bar to bar every night. Proud of his words, yet somewhat embarrassed of his chronic homelessness, Kerouac drew from this as part of his muse.

His productivity during this time was phenomenal. Pretty much all of his critical success came from the written word he produced during the late 1940s and early-to-mid 50s ("On the Road," his most popular work, was published in 1957, nearly seven years after it was written). By the time, and after writing more than 10 novels that would one day be published, Kerouac's fame finally hit and the rising tide of his existence hit its crest, he could no longer live in anonymity, or be the "observer" he so specifically became known for (along with his rebelliously vast disregard for the rules of prose). As he adapted to the cresting of the tide in his life, he lost all that was vital to his work.

With the fame he so greatly coveted, came the payout: a loss of what made his work so pure in the first place. In the end, what he craved stifled and eventually killed the color so greatly engrained within his work. The overall burden of being the caricature he created of himself weighed him down like a boulder, and cost him the intimacy of many friendships in his life. His production slipped and he failed to produce with the same vigor and individuality that had been so preeminent in his work during the pre-fame portions of his life, but what he lost as the cresting wave covered his lifetime's shining moment can only be measured by what was gained during these vitally productive years of his life.

Kerouac's voice captured a generation.

He was the father of a movement, but also a casualty of its popularity. The tide crashed over his life and his generation in such a way that he could no longer reinvent himself, and — in his early death — it cost him the chance to witness the ever-growing change, the draining of freedom, here in the free America that he so proudly railed for and eagerly described as a place, "too vast with people too vast to ever be degraded to the low level of a slave nation," one that he could "go hitch hiking down that road and on into the remaining years of my life knowing that outside of a couple fights in bars started by drunks I’ll not have a hair of my head (and I need a haircut) harmed by Totalitarian cruelty—"

Did the cresting tide cover over Kerouac before he could see the falling star that has become this once-great nation? Was he spared this realization of this as the Nixon administration slowly sapped individual rights in its battle with the counter-culture during the pre-Watergate era? He missed the rigged fight, and slow yet dangerous catharsis within our borders. Slowly but surely, we have watched individual liberty fall to the wayside under countless disguises from national security to educational reform. Nobody is immune from culpability on the right or the left. Our nation, indivisible, brought this upon itself.

The very same country that Kerouac so grandly described is no longer the same place. The rising tide of the counterculture movement of the 60s and early 70s has crashed into an even more polarizing fight as the divide between classes and cultures becomes more prevalent. We are once again becoming tribal in nature, but it is no longer of the racial variety. Ideology has replaced genes as the catalyst for this ever-evolving battle within the cultures and peoples of this great nation. Our current leaders — the same "freedom fighters" from the freedom and peace movements of the 1960s — have failed us, giving way to the status quo of power and greed.

Perhaps, just perhaps, things weren't as beautiful as Kerouac had though they were in the first place.

Maybe, just maybe, his detachment from the mainstream is what blinded him to the reality that those with power will fight like rabid dogs to keep it, no matter the cost, and no matter the political affiliation. When his friend, Allen Ginsberg, fought for freedom of speech for his controversial poem, "Howl," Kerouac may have seen this coming political storm, or perhaps — in his mind's eye — he saw this as real progress, not a slippery slope towards something worse.

Worse off is the thought that perhaps the great heroes we once honored in our own youth were mere puppets in a propaganda campaign during the early life of what is now known as our modern media. The shine, moxie and glistening beauty surrounding the perception of our great heroes of old has been removed from the facade like a vintage Star Wars figure being taken out of the shipping box and thrown into the bath tub for play time. My generation is finally feeling its way out of this modern age of communication and information, and what we are finding has disillusioned us to the past we could not touch or see with our own senses.

What was an homage to the beauty of this once-great nation has now, today, become something out of an George Orwell novel or a Philip K. Dick short story.

My generation can no longer trust the history books, or view the old publications and movie reels our government so easily spoon-fed to the earlier generation's naivete with anything less than distrust. We are the first generation to clearly see and experience the coming combination of this powerful beast that controls our attention today in the mainstream media and government officials. No generation has been at ground zero for this fight more than Generation-Y as well as the latter portions of Gen-X, and the fallout has become a general distrust of anything we've ever been told was right and true, even what our own parents told us about our past through their own unknowing indoctrination into this "beast" during their youth.

Just because it's honest doesn't make it true.

Similar to how the steroid abuse scandal in Major League Baseball has forced many to always question the success of any player thanks to the trust that was broken prior to the steroid crackdown of the early 2000s, my generation can't look back on our "heroes" without wondering how honorable they really were. I can't help but look at great leaders like George Washington (was he a slave owner?), FDR (did he have foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor?), Abraham Lincoln (was it corporate greed in search of control over the cotton industry or slavery that truly sparked the Civil War?), and countless others portrayed as epic heroes in my youth but have since stumbled into controversy posthumously thanks to continued research and a look between the lines of the history that is almost always written by those considered to be the winners.

The worry that sits within my core is one that wonders how much of what I was taught as a student was a form of propaganda itself. This is the beauty in Kerouac's description of the American life he knew, an America less convoluted by large government or the flourishing business of "pay-for-play politics." I can't help but marvel at how little focus is placed on literature as our historical basis, compared to "history books" and Wikipedia. To understand what our nation was like during a specified time period, one need only to look at the passionate words from the writers of their time period. A failure to do this neuters the strength buried within the written word, and the rising tide of each generation as described by first-hand accounts, not a politically-motivated bastardization of the truth that comes with revisionist history.

The rising tide facing my generation is more about trust and faith than anything, and the battle lines are intertwining. When a large portion of an entire generation loses faith in its government, its political process, its truthfulness outside of political gain, and the general fabric that brought us into our role as a world power and protective big brother, which has been deformed — in our eyes — into the Orwellian version of a "protective big brother," we have a rising tide that could turn into a tsunami of destruction further down the line.

With every passing generation, each imparts its own strengths and weaknesses to the next. Ours will most definitely pass on its serious distrust in the system, our lack of faith in our leaders, and a general malaise that anything we try to do in a attempt to better this country only falls on deaf ears and is slated to be swallowed up into the corrupt system that has mutated into its current corporate form.

This is the modern rising tide heading towards the shores of our discontent.

How much it will cover over, how strong its first landfall will be and how long it will roll over us is anyone's guess, but the only thing I can guarantee is that once it rolls back, it will only come back stronger the next time, and — if we haven't built our belief systems and accountability on dry land instead of the sandy shored — its damage may exceed anything our imagination could conceive.

But, as in all things, there must be hope that tomorrow can be the first day of a brave new world the likes of Aldous Huxley couldn't possibly imagine...