|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Getting older has some positives — like knowing you’ll be dead before anyone in Gen Z is in a position of power — but things sure get confusing. Perhaps it’s having grown up in a time when talent was necessary to achieve fame, men competed against men in athletic events, and politicians were allowed to be self-serving, power-hungry, assholes – but at least needed to be on the un-intubated-side of a coma.
So many confusing things today, though …
For starters, TikTok challenges baffles us older folks. In pursuit of “clicks,” kids are literally dying … in droves. They eat Tide-Pods, fall off cliffs and buildings trying to take selfies – and one poor lad died recently from eating a ghost-pepper potato chip. I joined the Marines, and ergo committed myself to dying for my country – but death by detergent and snack foods just doesn’t have the same ring.
If I was an “influencer,” I’d make up my own challenge to the TikTok youth: Pull up your pants, turn your hat around (ahem), and get a job. Maybe I’d offer a second challenge, daring them to read a book before they vote. Any book. Charlotte’s Web would be sufficient, and if they enjoyed that, maybe they could explore more about rural life and symbolism by reading Animal Farm.
Actors shrieking their politics are also odd to us old people. Hollywood’s long been overflowing with insecure leftists twerps, but back in the day they had the sense to keep their 11th-grade educated mouths shut. In the words of the wise Michael Jordan, “I don’t talk politics, because everyone buys sneakers.”
***
Look: An actor plays dress-up-and-pretend for a living. They recite words someone else wrote. They are told by a director where and how to stand, and what facial expressions to use. I mean, there are dogs who are fine actors. And while I certainly cried when Old Yeller died, I wasn’t crying because that gunshot silenced his insights into quantitative easing.
Reality TV is also a mystery. There’s more ad-libbing in a Broadway production of Death of a Salesman than in a “reality” TV show. Scripts are written, and the “characters” are provided with any and all lines requiring drama, humor insight or self-reflection. Yet the youth of America eat it up.
You youngsters want real drama? Next Thanksgiving, set up your smart phone to record, and spew your political views between bites of the meal your folks paid for. Wait until the adults are a few drinks in, and declare your belief that America’s open borders and defund-the-police policies are good things. Note, however, you might be asked how many dollars you pay in taxes to support the millions of illegal arrivals — and will likely be denied your dessert if your defense is along the lines, “I’m rubber and you’re glue! Whatever you say bounces of me, and sticks to you!”
Don’t get too upset, though. After Dad has ordered to your room in the basement, Mom will probably sneak you some dessert when she brings your evening tomato soup and grilled cheese sammich.
Anonymous keyboard crusaders and their sad boiling hate are also a bit hard for us to understand. It wasn’t that long ago one of America’s great maxims was, “You are free to say anything you want, but you aren’t free from the consequences that follow.”
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, if you wanted to insult or correct someone, you wanted your name attached to it, provided your insult or correction was based in logic and facts. You wanted credit for your insights when you knocked a know-it-all down a couple pegs. You wanted them to know, “Yeah, it’s me calling you out.”
Why @WritingFromMySafeSpace thinks anyone cares what they have to say is ponderous. I can only assume they want a layer of anonymous protection between their real name and their half-witted verbal diarrhea … lest someone who knows them realize they are in fact as moronic as they appear in real life.
“Not showing up for work” is yet another mystery to those of us over forty. In our world, if an employer offered you money in exchange for your time and toil, it was deemed fairly sacred. He made the offer, and you accepted. You could quit, of course, but the idea of simply calling and saying, “I won’t be in today,” was tempered by the reality of the second half of the sentence, which is, “so someone else will have to do my work, because I’m a self-absorbed little dick.”
I do think it’s pretty hilarious Millennials are now aging into management roles in the retail, F&B, and service industries, and are now dealing with “themselves” as employees. If you’re one of them, put on your helmet … Gen Z will soon be your work force.
Neck tattoos on college students are another thing that somehow fails to compute. As hard as it is to believe, there will come a time in life when you’ll want to move up and on from being a sandwich artist — and if a Boomer or Gen X boss needs to hire a new 6-figure hot shot, odds are he’ll ponder, “I wonder who my Boomer and Gen X clients will better relate to? This sharp-looking kid? Or the kid with the Chinese symbol for sour milk on his neck?”
Gender, of course, is a biggie — but I’ve expressed my views on that. So let me ask this simple yet confusing-to-us-old-people question about drag queen story hour: If they are going to selflessly sacrifice their time to read to children, why don’t they read to adults at homeless shelters? To old people, trapped in the hell of Medicaid nursing homes? To inner city kids in their horrifying Section 8 neighborhoods, who don’t have transportation to a local library? To adults in addiction treatment centers? To adults attending local meetings of the DNC?
Why is it always and only to children?
It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Everyone knows the answer … the same way they know why parents at a school board meeting are shut down for obscenity, when in fact they’re simply reading from a book in a middle-school library.
***
RELATED | SOUTH CAROLINA SCHOOLS CHIEF BLASTS WOKE PROPAGANDA
***
One thing I can understand, however, is young people’s feeling of hopeless about the future. The elected Boomers — left and right — have simply bought their own re-elections through unthinkable levels of spending, most of it on full-retard pork, earmarked to go back home, thus ensuring their sheep will re-elect them.
The only thing worse than what the Boomers have done to Gen Z and the Millennials… the only thing that could make the future even bleaker … is what the Gen Z and the Millennials are planning to do to themselves.
Their plan to save the nation is based on one talking point: Tax the rich for “their fair share!”
I’m not rich. That sounds good to me. And I say, “To hell with that. Let’s just seize all their money and call it a day. It would be a blow for social justice, economic justice, and would, you know, teach those greedy bastards a lesson. Show ‘em who’s boss.”
Surely the math will work. Let’s see ... in 2020, the federal government spent $5.4 trillion dollars. The top 13 richest people in America are worth around $1 trillion. So if we seized all their money, that could pay for — hell, more than a fiscal quarter! If we seized all the money of the top 1,000, we’d be covered for over a year … maybe two!
During that “free” year or two, all us working stiffs could chip in some extra jack with our tax returns, and we’d easily raise enough to offer free healthcare, free college, a conversion to an all-electric economy, allow unlimited immigration, expand entitlements to everyone making less than $250,000, and cut the breasts off every Tomboy in America.
As I said, us older folk find many things today to be extremely confusing. The ways of young whipper-snappers baffle us. What baffles us the most? Their plan to fix the situation.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR ...
Prioleau Alexander is a freelance writer, focusing mostly on politics and non-fiction humor. He is the author of four books: ‘You Want Fries With That?,’ ‘Dispatches Along the Way,’ 'Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?' and 'They Don't Call It The Submission Process For Nothing.' Oh, and if you want to see his preferred bio pic? Click here …
***
WANNA SOUND OFF?
Got something you’d like to say in response to one of our articles? Or an issue you’d like to proactively address? We have an open microphone policy here at FITSNews! Submit your letter to the editor (or guest column) via email HERE. Got a tip for a story? CLICK HERE. Got a technical question or a glitch to report? CLICK HERE.
13 comments
Imagine being a boomer and handing off a nearly completely destroyed middle America off to future generations and saying you’re glad you won’t live to see them take it over and attempt to fix it. Have you tried taking your eyes off trans women for a second to look in a mirror?
I swear, if I start sounding like Drunkle, my kids will have my express permission to put me in the memory care unit.
I tried imagining being a white, male boomer today, but I wasn’t raised with society catering to my every whim, so I just pretended to be a big fat crying baby fresh off the teat.
About the same thing.
Imagine buying a new Corvette. You drive it for a while until one day you wrap it around a tree after doing triple digits in a school zone. Miraculously, you survive, even if some of the kids didn’t. The wrecker comes to take what’s left of it and before the cop shoves you into his car you scream at the guy scraping your ruined heap of metal off the pavement, “You better not scratch the paint!”
Now all you need is a crippling fear of drag queens and a bizarre obsession with Tide pods that you’ll take with you to the grave, and bam, you have the full Boomer experience.
Ol Drunkle misses the days when Republican politicians could vape marijuana in a theater full of people, while jerking off their Democrat friend on the first date and then getting kicked out while lying about the whole incident and not face any blowback from their fellow Republicans!
Oh wait, that’s going on right now.
Also, on the topic of politicians in near comas, this dumbassed moron isn’t old enough to remember Storm Thurman.
Gen Z has been raised by Drunkle’s generation.
Another huge failure by Drunkle and his generation of entities pussies and full grown snowflakes.
That Escort Granny Boebert makes Sarah Palin and her drunken violent clan almost look like normal people….for Republicans.
Why do all boomer complaints about getting older boil down to…
”Why can’t I be an asshole without consequences anymore?”
The most entitled group of people in the Country aren’t handling their twilight years very well.
Boomers live in the environment they created, so boo-fucking-hoo to the Worst Generation. Y’all truly are an embarrassment.
Boomers are afraid Millennials and Zoomers are going to take something they inherited and absolutely muck it up for their kids and grandkids.
In other words, they’re afraid they’ll turn out to be… well, Boomers.
Love this guy. And I’m not drunk.
Of course you do. You no doubt listen to the same propaganda he’s allowed to take over what’s left of his brain. The fun part will be when the GOP cuts all the “entitlements” they keep whining about not being able to cut and Drunkle sobers up long enough to realize that by entitlements, they meant his social security and medicare. I don’t know how he reconciles the fact that this country was at it’s greatest in terms of innovation and productivity when CEOs didn’t make 1000x more than their workers, when the wealthy did in fact pay real taxes and weren’t allowed to evade them. What the GOP wants is a country made up of the ultra wealthy and blue collar workers. No in-between. That’s the whole argument for “no college 4 u” that they keep on flogging. And I bet you’ve believed every word of that bs too.
Austerity is capitalism’s way of socializing the costs. Tax cuts are capitalism’s way of privatizing the gains. Culture war is capitalism’s way of distracting a sizable portion of the population from realizing this connection, or properly associating the decline in the working class way of life to late stage capitalism.
The ultimate goal of conservative politics is to continue the transfer of wealth from labor to capital by any and all means. It’s a ruthless, soulless machine designed to enrich a limited number of ghoulish sociopaths and their willing accomplices. Whether it is sustainable, whether it will do lasting damage to mankind, or even drive humans to extinction, is not a concern. In the Church of the Free Market, all is done for the glory of mammon.
I would like to thank this blogger for pointing out his generation’s failure as parents and role models.
Of course, he hysterically tries to deflect blame away from the source of his outrage, but the fact remains….this sad man has only himself and his peers to blame for raising the generation he’s whining about.
There is so much misinformation (or disinformation) I don’t know where to start.
It’s hard to read Animal Farm and not realize Donald Trump and his Republican supporters would be the pigs in that story, and the MAGA grunts would be the other animals. But somehow you seem to have done it. Does Kelly Ann Conway’s “alternate facts” and Trump’s the law is for thee but not for me ring a bell to you?
Entitlements are Social Security and Medicare. Everyone who works and pays into the SS system gets those regardless of how much they make; even if they make 10 million a year. That is what makes them an entitlement. You are entitled to them because you earned them. Republicans have duped you guys into believing that when they say they want to cut entitlements, they are talking about taking benefits from poor minorities and people on food stamps; which you guys are fine with. Republicans want to cut taxes on people like Donald Trump and giant corporations and pay for those cuts by cutting “entitlements” i.e. Social Security and Medicare.
There was a time before Social Security and Medicare. Before Social Security 60% of Americans over the age of 65 had poverty level income. Before Medicare 50% of Americans over the age 65 had no health insurance. Back then in small towns across the south, they relied on country docs making house calls for minor illnesses, they would take what you could pay, hence the old stories about working for pigs and chickens. For more serious illnesses they relied on county-owned hospitals. The care was crappy, but they would treat you as best they could, even if you did not have money. Guess what that is. Real socialized medicine. Not subsidized medical insurance like we have under Medicare. Do Republicans even know what insurance is?
Your minimizing the under-taxation of the richest Americans is a joke. You just admitted that 13 people have a trillion dollars. That is more than the combined net worth of the 1 billion poorest people in the world and that does not even consider the wealth tied up in the largest corporations, many of whom are not paying significant income taxes. Do you realize a billionaire is likely to pay a smaller percentage of his income in taxes than you are; and yet he uses a far bigger percentage of the nation’s resources than you do? Did you know that the richest 1% of Americans own 54% of all stocks owned by Americans in total? That means that 54% of every corporate tax cut goes to the richest 1%. Increase that to the richest 10% and that goes to 89% of all stocks. The net worth of the richest 1% of Americans INCREASED by 6 trillion dollars LAST YEAR. The CEOs of most giant international companies will earn more each year than 80% of the people who work for their company will earn in a lifetime. Wealth disparity in this nation has reached and exceeded that of the pre-depression Gilded Age. Maybe when people are paying their fair share of taxes we can then determine how much we really need to cut spending, rather than just trying to pad the lives of the rich and famous by cutting programs that have made the lives of middle-income Americans significantly better.
As for Millennials and Gen Z, they are highly educated, social, and believe in working together; and they aren’t burdened by the fear-generated hate and anger that is so prevalent among right-wing Boomers and Gen Xers. Every generation thinks those who come after them are going to hell in a handbasket. I think they will do fine.
Excellent comment!