#intergenerational conflict

Millennials were the first generation to grow up with the boundlessness of the digital world, so they are extremely well documented by others and themselves but for many the silly shit was not photographed, certainly not on video, or was pretty easy to scrub. Gen Z hasn’t had that luxury, their silly shit has been reposted, saved, and used to harass or demean them far beyond what their elders could imagine.

It’s so important not just to be cool or hip or whatever but also to not be cringe. That’s why they’re a very referential group (humor and culture reference something else instead of stand on their own). That’s why they’re afraid to speak in public or be perceived in any way they don’t specifically consent to. “I didn’t consent to be perceived” isn’t even a strawman, it’s a direct quote. Don’t react. Don’t engage, even if you’re expected (or required). Don’t be earnest. Don’t care too much.

I saw a post somewhere in the last day or so where some GenZ was talking about 'Boomers/GenX' in the same breath. Honestly, it wouldn't leave me alone over the next day and it kept coming back to me. A new reaction image was called for. One that was a bit more than just something from a meme generator. To the Image Manipulator!!! -I went.

We're a lost generation. In most generational discussions I see nowadays, we're skipped and forgotten entirely when the Millennial/GenY/GenZ folks very rightfully call the Boomers on their bullshit. They've been marginalizing, infantilizing, devaluing, and minimalizing us for better than 30 years now. And we were so effectively deleted from any intergenerational conversation, we may as well have been disintegrated. And now this creep wants to lump us in with our oppressors?

The Boomers took everything for themselves. They've near as dammit destroyed the world except for the riots and the screaming. GenX will still be one of the first generations in American history that will be worse off than the one immediately before it. Most Boomers so very thoroughly did not learn the lessons their parents failed at, that they essentially BECAME them. For all the peace, love and understanding they preached when they were fighting for equality and against war and violence, they surely took up all the weaponry and bigotry of their predecessors, plus every new innovation created in our childhoods in order to consolidate and ensure nothing would or could ever be taken from them. Or given to those who followed. Their parents destroyed healthcare, and the unions. The 'Silent Generation' established the military and prison industrial complex. And as loudly as Phil Collins sang 'Our generation will put it right! We're not just making promises that we know you'll never keep.' in 'Land of Confusion'? They never did. The Boomers found the machinery the Silents left when they started dying off by attrition. And instead of dismantling it, they got behind the wheel and ran anyone down who asked them to follow through on those very same promises the Silents never kept. And they did it quicker than George Carlin could describe them as going from the generation of love to the generation of 'GIMME IT, IT'S MINE!" They didn't fix shit. They doubled down.

And then after sending us to the FIRST Iraq war for oil, putting NAFTA, GATT and the Patriot Act in place, left us with no worker's rights at all, established the part time-multiple job norm, turned higher education into a mechanism for indentured feudalism, eliminated the middle class, crashed the stock market twice, eliminated retirement for any generation after them, have pilfered our social security without paying it back so that it's expected to be insolvent by 2035, gutted every voting right they fought for in the 60's and 70's, and very nearly destroyed our country with a genuine fascist / white supremacist coup... that ignoramus (and I use the word with precision) lumps Gen X in with these prizewinners? I got four words for that.

Fuck you, man. We're just as fucked as anyone that came after them. Maybe moreso cos morons like the one that was doing the lumping-in can't see that the Boomers are trying to leave us holding the bag for their shit. The Boomers learned 'divide and conquer' from some of the best. And they're doing it to every generation after them to keep us from uniting in rage and putting them in prison for every crime against humanity and nature they've committed since the bicentennial.

I'll leave ya with one of the more defining moments in the movies when it comes to GenX and the Boomers. This was back when the oldest of us were only 15 or 20 back in 1985. I was 14 myself. But this concerns you. It concerns all of us. It should concern the Boomers too. I'm not sure how they see their generation going out. But it will not be pleasant. Nor will it be kind. Payback's a bitch. And nothing is forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.

Richard Vernon: You think about this: when you get old, these kids - when *I* get old - they're going to be running the country.

Carl: Yeah.

Richard Vernon: Now this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That when I get older, these kids are going to take care of me.

Carl: I wouldn't count on it.

One more quote for ya.. and I'll quit going back and adding stuff to this. Or at least I'll try.

“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”

I got into a fight over Bukowski with my step-dad.

The other night, he caught me ordering

You Get So Alone At Times via amazon,

and he sat down beside me and he started to roll a cigarette

and he stared me down very seriously. And spoke:

‘You can't just order Bukowski on amazon, kid

you hear me, you must go out and find him,

find him tattered at a dinky book store

or in an abandoned leather suitcase at a dubious ware house

but never

ever

do you order him simply on amazon.’

He went on and on

about my generation and me specifically,

how we're getting too lazy, too convenient

and keep adventures from happening to us.

You see, my step dad is a well-read man.

Owns a library with all the world's classics

and the post modern gems

as well as some japanese poetry,

plus books about love and books about death

and books about books, as you can imagine.

He lets them collect dust and pats their backs from time to time,

feeling very well adjusted for owning them (who can blame him)

and that's completely fine, i guess.

Smoke-veiled, I collected my breath:

‘For me, i'm not exactly well adjusted

to society or life or any standard you hold yourself to. See, i

desperately needed this book,

i sought after a treatment for

what keeps me from putting a library, a life of my own together,

and it was a sad dark wednesday night when i hit the 'Add to chart'-button,

in a week of sad dark wednesday nights

in what felt like a year of that exactly miserable dark wednesday nights and

i was too weak to let adventure come and get me.’

So that i told him.

Well, of course he didn’t understand.

Strangely, all that either of us is going to take

from this conversation into our future,

The internet is ablaze with criticism aimed at Generation Alpha – that’s my generation, the youngest one out there. But the two generations doing all the finger-pointing (Gen Z and Millennials) have a serious blind spot: the things they blast us for are actually problems they created. The “Skibidi Toilet” craze Take that “Skibidi Toilet” thing. What even is it? Honestly, most of my friends and…

The Boomer generation may have been the first to make calling the cops pigs popular, but they're also the same generation who put Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump in the White House.

I knew the Boomers sold out in a major way when I found out at a young age that Jerry Rubin - one of the Chicago Seven, for fuck's sake - was a stockbroker in the '80s.