This column by Kurt Schlichter confused me at first:
With all the awful things happening now – the discord, the anger, the stupidity – at least those of my generation can rest easy knowing that the Millennials are going to suffer after we’re gone. Sure, I’m going to die a lot sooner than them – unless someone invents some sort of expensive life extension potion that I can buy but they can’t because they will still be paying off their degrees in Oppression Studies and Virtue Signaling Arts until the year 2083. But at least I’ll know that we left them a suitably terrible world, since they are a terrible generation.
Millennials are the spawn we deserve – annoying, posturing, and frequently pierced. They are utterly convinced of their own moral superiority, and yet they don’t even believe in morals. Well, that’s not quite true – they just confuse morals with the increasingly bizarre patchwork of taboos and fetishes of the social justice weirdos they use as their moral compasses. When you ask people, “What’s the world’s biggest problem,” and they answer, “The structural paradigm imposed by cisgender Western males,” and you reply, “How about, I dunno, ISIS?” and they answer “Well, who are we to judge their culture?” it’s slappin’ time.
We warned them to stay off our figurative lawns, and now it’s time to figuratively tackle them like Kentucky libertarians.
Wait, what? The Millennials aren’t our spawn. I don’t quite… oh.
I was born during the last week of the Baby Boom, making me…older than the Millennials. So I straddle that useless generation and the useless one that followed. It used to be called Generation X, but no one calls it that anymore because it made no lasting impression. Obama was in my generation. We’ll never live that down. In any case, I remember when calculators were newfangled, phones were attached to walls, and Showtime was the bomb.
Oh, I suspect Generation X will make an impression that will last a lot longer than the Baby Boomers self-celebrated world-changing ever did. We’re going to clean up the mess that the two preceding generations made, with Generation Zyklon providing the footsoldiers.
Yeah, we messed up, but you Millennials reading this on your smartphones, which you can see without glasses or squinting, shouldn’t act so high and mighty. You had a chance to fix all of this and instead you’ve chosen to never move out of your parents’ houses and to just sit around and invent new pronouns for genders that don’t exist. A couple decades down the road, when I’m dead from chronic bitterness and drinking too much expensive cabernet that I buy with the Social Security money you’ll be toiling to pay me, you won’t have families or careers. You’ll be my age and still making coffee for the next generation of ingrates, the children of the immigrants and super-religious Christians who represent the only portion of America still making babies. You’ll come home to your used Mitsubishi love robot named Olive, reheat some Sara Lee avocado toast sticks, and watch Saturday Night Live as it tries to make fun of President Donald Trump, Jr.
The saddest thing about the Baby Boomers is that they STILL can’t accept the fact that they are old and uncool. Decades ago, when they were freaking out about turning 40, Generation X used to joke about how the Boomers were going to try to pull off the 70 is the new 30. But we didn’t think they would actually do it. And then they did. They’re STILL trying to sell Jane Fonda as a sex symbol and she’s practically embalmed.
But while we’re still here together, with me owning stuff and you struggling to afford your daily kombucha smoothie, we face many shared challenges. There’s that giant debt, and there are those foreign people who want to kill us, and there is the terrifying fact that we are at each others’ throats here at home. We know how this plays out if we don’t fix it – bad for me, but super-bad for you. Maybe we should try and square things away. Maybe we should stop assuming the worst about each other, start thinking about what unites us instead of what divides us, and work together to make a better tomorrow. Maybe.
Just shut up. Seriously. While there are individual exceptions, the Baby Boomers, as a generation, have literally nothing to offer the world except their merciful extinction. Maybe – no, definitely – they should accept the fact that they were the stupidest, most destructive, most foolish grasshopper generation human history has ever recorded, stop trying to defend their utterly indefensible record, and do their best to exit the historical stage in suitably penitent humility.
They won’t. But they should.
Generation X knows better than to expect anything from them. We knew better than to expect anything from them even when our grandparents were still around. And it is all too typically Boomer to take solace in “revenge” upon a generation whose only crime is to be young by celebrating the fact that, unlike most previous generations, they have left the world a much worse place than they found it.