A ReRun Decade.

Michiko Kakutani captures in words what I'd been suspecting for a few months now, especially when evaluating the performance -- in reality -- of what this new presidential administration promised.

A Change.

It hasn't happened yet -- too many of the old Boomers, with their continuous 60s cultural war battles being carried on into the new century, it seems. Vietnam, the 1968 protests -- all over again. Do you side with the conservative cops, or the hippie affluent youth? Do you chant slogans, or go to work, muttering things under your breath? Do you vote global, but participate local?

Where are our new young leaders? Still in thrall to their parents' Boomer generation, incapable of breaking the family financial bonds that tie them, now that it's so fiscally scary to make a journey of one's own, it seems?

One day, the shift in cultural, and political, leadership will come.

I predict though, that it will arrive quietly, and only in the looking back will we note that the torch has been passed. Not ceremonially so much, but in reality, as the young up and comers stand up, and make their own ways in the world.

Not dependent so much on the traditional ways of getting their voices heard -- the publishing houses, the daily papers, the video must see's , but concentrating more on that rugged honesty of the truth of the matter -- the undeniability of a situation (or situations, plural) that the more simplistic simply refuse or are incapable of grappling with, in this lowest-common-denominator age.

If the message is strong enough, the readers will follow. The cultural leaders won't be the most credentialed, the most linked, nor the most connected in terms of who Mommy or Daddy knows and can put you in touch with.

The future will bring change... even if we notice it only in retrospect, once the superficialities are passed. Nevermind a torch, or a more formal ceremony, it's the wild fires that rage and burn most brightly that you can count on putting off the most heat and eventually, changing the American landscape most completely.

In the end, I suspect, it won't be the victims defining American life so much looking forward, but the survivors, who came up in an age not of affluence, but of uncertainty.

Diversity counts, of course, but not so much for its face value, but for what lessons, if any, were learned. Experience for its own sake, not for a compiled list of accomplishments. Freedom as its own reward...

You'll know it when you see it, naturally.