At home the issues facing minorities went, for the most part, ignored. Jim Crow laws were allowed to stand in the south until major Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation to be unconstitutional. But even still that did not solve the problem of good old fashioned prejudice, which was as rampant as ever. And not every woman was delighted to once again be her husband's house servant. The war machine of WW2 had given many women their first pay check. And the sense of power and freedom even menial jobs provided was not something many wanted to trade in for being cooped up in a split level tract house with only the companionship of a vacuum cleaner and a screaming five year old. .
To the Beats the only solution to a life of domestic stagnation was to pack up and let life lead you down one winding road after another. There was a certain comfort in the unknown. Ambiguity turned survival into a triviality, while one could find the deepest meaning in chance and whimsy. When mere existence doesn't seem to be guaranteed it's the little moments of perfection that become one's focus. No other Beat poet understood that concept as well as Jack Kerouac. "Jack Kerouac single handedly created the beat generation. Although Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs Brought their separate and cumulative madness to the beat generation, it was Kerouac who was the Unifying Principle."(Krim,p.4).
While Kerouac certainly lived for the moment it would be missing the whole point of his work to claim that was just trying to get his kicks in before it was over. If anything, he eagerly awaited his termination. And found his solace in moments of pure tranquillity, since they were the closest he could come to the state he named the Golden Eternity, which he believed awaited him after death. This was in opposition to his friend and fellow beat Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg believed "in grasping after life as much as you can because of it's sweet sadness and because you would be dead someday"( Hipkiss,p.