We have a saying in New Albany, which I typically refer to as the “Thrasher Axiom” in honor of the man who coined it: “We’re all here because we’re not all there.”
These words of extreme wisdom should be inscribed on each and every civic sewer bill and commemorative Harvest Homecoming wooden coin, except the axiom needn’t be restricted to any one municipality, college, trinket shop or goat farm. It’s universal.
Geography by necessity limits us; physically, we can’t ever be more than one place at a time. However, in terms of our consciousness, the scope is far less restricted. New Albanians needn’t be rooted in mundane prevailing realities; rather, now as before, day dreaming is absolutely free — and by extension, again speaking about consciousness, we all arrive at wherever we are right now via different pathways and experiences, which must be kept in mind especially when the discussion turns to generational differences.
When I was a kid, we had a black and white television set, some construction paper, scissors and school paste. These days, an eight-year-old is a “digital creator” on social media with all the digital bells and whistles. These situations differ. While I can and do complain until the cows come home (spoiler: steaks come from them, not Kroger) about millions of adults claiming to be “digital creators,” the true significance of the comparison lies in what we were taught when young, and how we learned the lessons.
Or, to be breathtakingly obvious, current beer “creators” (and their customers) who are younger than my own cohort grew up differently than we did. Not better or worse, but differently. There is nothing shocking or innovative about this observation; it’s just that lately, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how my attitudes toward beer were shaped in days of relative youth by a simplistic milieu in which better beer was largely unknown.
Specifically, 2023 will always be remembered (at least inside my noggin) as the year of the St. Patrick’s Day Massacre. Rather than recap in this space the green beer wars sadly occurring on that day, go here: Green with entropy?
The way I felt about the beer revolution in America in 1989, when there’d been only tiny inklings of it in Louisville and environs, helped to shape my consciousness about better beer. After all, the Marxists always said that class consciousness must come first, as it leads to readiness for class revolution.
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