Bonfire Hypocrisy

Nathan Plumley, Contributing Writer

Bonfire night, known across America now a days as Guy Fawkes Night, annually commemorates the survival of King James I after an attempt on his life known as the Gunpowder Plot was foiled on November 5, 1605. Guy Fawkes was one of a dozen people involved in the plot but is specifically mentioned by name because he was the one who was caught guarding the explosives that were strategically placed beneath the House of Lords. Acting on an anonymous tip, authorities arrested Fawkes below Westminster Palace. Fawkes committed suicide before the day of his execution, adhering stoically to his anti-government sentiments. In celebration of the plot’s failure people lit bonfires around London and held festivities. The monarchy commemorated the event with a public holiday that is still to this day observed on November fifth of every year.

More than four hundred years after the incident, the holiday remains but its message has drastically changed, correlating with the general mind-set of Western populations as their philosophies regarding a government’s role in society evolved sporadically over time. We know Guy Fawkes from the popular V for Vendetta comics and most notably from the film with Hugo Weaving starring as the masked historic figure.

Anonymous adopted the mask as its defining symbol, embracing the anti-authoritarian sentiments associated with Guy Fawkes. This past fifth of November saw worldwide protests bound together under the banner of the Million Mask March, which connected and mobilized protesters worldwide using social media pages associated with highly controversial, subversive groups including but not limited to the Anonymous movement and the Occupy movement.

Marches took place in major cities where police mobilized riot squads. They prepared for the worst after recent leaks regarding the NSA shook the faith of the American people in their government’s adherence to the Constitution and after a near government default, has left an unacceptable amount of elected federal officials with all-time low approval ratings. According to The Denver Post, police began arresting protesters Tuesday night as they marched from the 16th Street Mall to the state Capital building, and at least one arrest was made during the march in Washington, D.C. according to The Washington Post. Across the pond, violence erupted and 15 people were arrested as the Anonymous movement led protests out front of Buckingham Palace and Parliament.

This past fifth of November also marked another strike against the intellectual integrity and moral aptitude of Generation Y protesters as it was revealed that the masks, which serve as the key symbol of the Anonymous resistance against global capitalism and which were dawned by all the protesters during the Million Mask March, are manufactured in factories by South America’s proletariat. This is only a few years after the failed Occupy movement, which was viewed on the whole as an unorganized music festival that was shut down nationwide due to the plausible threat of the camps becoming epicenters for disease epidemics.

Overall, this new generation’s fledgling grass roots movements are seriously lacking but only in the form of innovation and real world solutions. We are the most technologically capable and most educated generation America has seen and yet we’re squandering our gift with protests, where ideas are drastically overshadowed by eruptions of violence or the abandon of reason at the moment it’s most needed. It doesn’t seem that the first is a problem for our generation right now but the latter represents the meditated uncertainty and abandonment of leadership models that rendered the Occupy movement dead on arrival. We need to pull ourselves together as a generation. We know our government is dysfunctional but its dysfunction reflects on us as its subjects. Nobody ever taught us how, and there will be no How To book for this: we need to bootstrap humanity out of this hell on Earth and build the type of future we won’t have to shelter our children from like our parents had to shelter us.

This past fifth of November also marked another strike against the intellectual integrity and moral aptitude of Generation Y protesters as it was revealed that the masks, which serve as the key symbol of the Anonymous resistance against global capitalism and which were dawned by all the protesters during the Million Mask March, are manufactured in factories by South America’s proletariat. This is only a few years after the failed Occupy movement, which was viewed on the whole as an unorganized music festival that was shut down nationwide due to the plausible threat of the camps becoming epicenters for disease epidemics.

Overall, this new generation’s fledgling grass roots movements are seriously lacking but only in the form of innovation and real world solutions. We are the most technologically capable and most educated generation America has seen and yet we’re squandering our gift with protests, where ideas are drastically overshadowed by eruptions of violence or the abandon of reason at the moment it’s most needed. It doesn’t seem that the first is a problem for our generation right now but the latter represents the meditated uncertainty and abandonment of leadership models that rendered the Occupy movement dead on arrival. We need to pull ourselves together as a generation. We know our government is dysfunctional but its dysfunction reflects on us as its subjects. Nobody ever taught us how, and there will be no How To book for this: we need to bootstrap humanity out of this hell on Earth and build the type of future we won’t have to shelter our children from like our parents had to shelter us.