Our grandparents built things to last. They bought ties with heavy coins and hid bills in mattresses. Cabinets full of thick paper folders were kept behind locked doors in brick buildings and schoolhouses. Mortar held the bricks together, strong enough to withstand anything short of a bomb’s blast.

Our grandparents would take their time, waiting to get home before unwrapping the newspaper and shaking their heads at Herr Hitler and his bombs. Bombs that were getting louder and louder. For forty years, the bombs got louder, and the brick buildings got taller. TVs got brighter, music got wilder and then finally, some time in the 1980s, somebody fit 700 copies of an encyclopedia into the space of a fingernail and people started blowing coke out of the bills their grandparents kept dry while the mattresses were washed.

Some time, after the wall fell, people started to build buildings out of glass. Glass, hysterically standing in the face of the bombs. Bombs that have drowned out even the hope of a future free from them.

I asked someone where the phrase “We are the 99 percent” came from. He said he didn’t know. Who signs their name on the poster for a movement with no leadership? How do you abbreviate a mission statement for a consensus democracy? The group too chaotic to be described finds an identity in its unanimous, outraged voice.

One thing everyone agrees on here is that they have had enough and they won’t stay quiet anymore. Enough of a society, stratified and driven suicidal by the clamor of a century of raining bombs. The world is popping and hissing at the bolts. We’re told not to pay attention. Occupy Portland has just been evicted. Police officers shushing the crowd and taking down tents, can you blame them for playing their part? They hope that if they stop the talk about the pressure and the bombs, people will be calm and forget, but it’s becoming too loud to stand and there’s no ignoring it anymore.

It might be unspoken, but they all know it’s destined to end frantically, and that’s scary. It’s building on the horizon while we come of age, and yet there’s light at the end of the tunnel. With the mortar of the twentieth century crumbling and a power structure reeling, unable to sustain itself, might come the opportunity for a drastic change. These days we jump from one 2012 apocalypse myth to another, hypnotized like moths. But the apocalyptic tremors we feel building in this post 9/11 world are not ours, but our old society’s, and to us only the promise of sudden change.

We don’t have to bind ourselves to the expiring social model, we can let  crumble and aspire for more than repairing what we know. In these times of uncertainty, revel in the rare security of devoting your willpower to creating a future for yourself that will define society, rather than be defined by an antique version. What I’m saying to you is, if you’re crossing your fingers, about to dive into a career that is a part of a reeling social institution, don’t. Work to create, not repeat. If we take nothing for granted, live and learn with deliberation, then maybe we can ride out the change.

If we forget this war torn world like a bad dream while we build our own, maybe the coming tremors will shake it down. Or maybe not, maybe nothing changes and all we’re left with is having defined ourselves as redefining our world.