Yesterday around 12:30 I hopped on the bus on my way to work. For a Sunday it seemed crowded, filled with tourists and young European backpackers; something I hadn’t seen in San Diego for some time. Getting comfy in the back with the Oceanside veterans coming back from the VA hospital, I put on my iPod and started flipping through this week’s issue of Time. No, not the greatest magazine, but for someone who doesn’t watch TV, it makes me feel somewhat in touch with popular American opinion.

So page 15 and I get to Verbatim, Time’s version of quotes of the week. This one was second to last:

A society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, criticizing the culture of the Swinging ’60s.

I remember when I used to think that Blair was a wonderful politician, but in fact I was merely overcome by his Churchillesque charismatic intelligence. The truth is, Blair is nothing more than the articulate representative of the Neo-conservative triangle that extends from Washington D.C. to Canberra and London. (at least Aznar is now gone from Spain)

I arrived to Cardiff at 1:30 and stopped into Seaside Market for a six pack of beer. It was Flaco’s last day after more than two years of us working together and I told him I’d bring some beers by to celebrate.

A couple hours and a few beers later and I was all alone in the cafe. Literally there wasn’t a single customer to be seen. I put on some Dylan and started to sweep the cafe. Believe it or not I was still bothered by that Blair quote and listening to Bob Dylan’s inspiring lyricism in our old lonely seaside shack of a cafe I became nostalgic for a decade that I never saw: The Sixties.

Who is our Bob Dylan? Where is our Martin Luther King? Who has filled the shoes of Cesar Chavez and Bobby Kennedy? Name one famous radical who can compare to Malcom X or Stokely Carmichael or Bobby Seale or Abbie Hoffman? What about the activist celebrity poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder who challenged censorship, the Red Scare, and environmental degredation. Where were the sit-ins, the campus protests, the burning of bras, the Equal Rights Amendment and Civil Rights Movement.

Everything that tarnished those amazing people and movements (namely sex, drugs and rock and roll) are still around, but the political action is not. These were the depressing thoughts rolling around my head, the buzz still slightly there, as I swept the old wooden floor that will be demolished in a matter of months in the name of progress.

Today though, after my first day off in over a week, and a good surf through last week’s news I’m wondering if maybe a light of hope is glowing a little brighter than I had previously thought.

As I mentioned yesterday, Naomi Klein’s Guardian Article really summed up how I feel about this coming election and the four years following it. (a customer last night said that Michael Moore and Bill Maher were down on their knees on the Bill Maher show begging Nader not to run – anyone see this?) Then just now I finished reading Barak Obama’s keynote speech at the DNC which had been making so much noise throughout the blogosphere.

Obama’s centrist patriotism usually would have turned my stomach, but there is something about that speech – and maybe I’m falling for him the same way I fell for Blair – that makes you want to be a better person, in the words of Jack Nicholson. As Andrew Sullivan said, Obama was essentially emphasizing “Conservative values, Democratic compassion.” Not my cup of tea, but I’ll admit, I was moved.

Then I read Lawrence Lessig’s open letter to Fox Newsman Bill O’Reilly about how the latter abused and misquoted his guest Jeremy Glick.

Three supposedly outstanding (I’ve only seen one) liberal documentaries have recently been released and are making waves throughout the media: Fahrenheit 9/11, Outfoxed, and The Corporation.

So no, I’m not arguing that the strength and power behind the progress of the 60’s is here today; that’s just not so. But, the upside is that, with internet journalism and the new relative ease of making a documentary, money doesn’t have quite the grasp on power and communications that it did just 10 years ago. Which means that the voices of liberals and the working class will be made more and more accessible. And if articulate idealists like Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Barack Obama turn out to also be inspirational and honest leaders … well, it means I’ll be feeling a lot better than I was yesterday sweeping the floor.