Why Gen X Needs To Smack Gen Whine Down.

A provocative article by Robert Lanham at Radar Online - Generation Slap: They're naive, self-important, and perpetually plugged in. This is a call to arms against Millennials - popped up on one of the forums I frequent and prompted the response below. Go read the article first before continuing here. I'll wait...

You back? OK, here we go...

Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill. Unless you're a trembling simp, these words will guide you to do what needs to be done to save the world.

The "Greatest Generation" spawned the Baby Boomers who basically f*cked everything up. Who was M&A-ing everything in the Eighties and living the coked-out Miami Vice lifestyle? It wasn't Gen Xers like me. We sat in high school and watched the glory days of indiscriminate sex and non-harmful drug use pass us by and by the time we were ready to take our turn at the wheel, we had to steer the mess out of the ditch.

Of course, since the Boomers controlled the media, they whitewashed their culpability, made Gen X the patsies and proceeded to turn Gen Whine into the drones they hoped Gen X would be if it weren't for a few hitches of circumstance that tossed spanners in the works.

Problem #1 is that Generation X came up when there was a band called Generation X who had some other cohorts in the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Ramones et al and along with it the DIY ethos. DIY meant "Do It Yourself", not "Demand It, Yo", but the unintended consequence was those who took the slogan to heart made for uncooperative drones. As the realization that the Boomers had shafted us sunk in and that we spent our youth being needlessly badgered into wearing FRANKIE SAY WAR! HIDE YOURSELF t-shirts and being afraid of Reagan - BTW, number of nuclear wars started by Reagan: 0 - a natural cynicism and desire to strangle the Boomers with their Versace ties set in.

Unlike Gen Whine, Gen Xers were allowed to get poor grades and understand the pitfalls of underachievement. Today's spoiled twats have be told from the moment that they went to their pre-pre-pre-school Esperanto classes that they are special, entitled, the center of the Universe and poop nothing but rainbows. They've been chemically warehoused if they show the slightest signs of boisterousness - what used to be called "being a kid" - and rewarded for just showing up...whenever that may be.

During the dot.bomb boom, the laws of supply and demand (i.e. the need for people to work those mice) allowed for some abuses by the minions because, well, just because. Those Aeron chairs weren't going to fill themselves and largess flowed. Of course, it was all a sham and the turn of the Millennium brought the collapse of the Clinton-era house of cards, smoke and mirrors. The immutable laws of economics came back from their holiday on Pluto and here we are now.

The problem is that Gen Whine grew up looking at the fat days of the illusory Nineties and think that they are entitled to the same lax expectations of responsibility. Why shouldn't they? Their Boomer parents gave them everything they wanted (note: not needed) as if they had grown up during the Depression. More than that, they were terrified that not giving their precious widdle babies a Playstation, Xbox AND Nintendo will lead them to shoot up their schools. Small price to pay to save some lives, right? When the spoiled punks still went and slaughtered their classmates, some other scapegoat - videogames, rap music, Republicans, global warming - was found to deflect acknowledgment of their total failure as parents.

Since the Boomers were raised spoiled punks, how else could their spawnlings turn out? It would be easy for Gen X to be bitter about the poofy treatment these emo pussies have it, but instinctively we know that if this whole shebang isn't going to end up in the ash heap of history it's going to require us to step up and salvage the nation by strangling the Boomers and their worthless Twittring twit kids in their sleep.

I jest. (A little.) But the shallow nature of Gen Why is evident in their inability to use proper English and grammar - this board spoils you guys; try hanging where the average poster is btwn 16-23 and weep for the Queen's English - and LULZ, OMG, WTF are considered Hemingwayesque expressions of the human condition. There is little ability to comprehend complex concepts and premises and as a result they respond enthusiastically to the most profound political ideology since Plato trod the sands of Greece....

CHANGE! HOPE!

We are sooooooooooooooo f*cked.

As the article mentioned, there's a lot more of these mouth-breathing Facebookers than there are of us, but using some jujitsu, it will be possible to keep these morons in their place. For starters, since they've be programmed to believe that everything will be handed to them, they have little ability to actually fight for it. Oh, their mommies will come into the office to scream at us for denying their golden rainbow-pooping children the Red Bull IV and a 24" LCD monitor so they can have all their social networking sites open at once - they can't master tabs in Firefox, I suppose - but tough f*cking sh*t, lady. Take your spawn out of our building and drop them at the car wash where people of their motivation are a good fit, career-wise.

The reason we can do this is unlike Jen Wha, we have a historical perspective that only age can provide and living through revolutionary changing times gives a sense of how things change. Today's kid who is old enough to drink was born in...wait for it....1987. (This year's newly minted voterbots were born in 1990.) The best-selling albums were Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" and Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" respectively and little Suzy Bingedrinker's first CD ("What's an album, Grandpa?") was perhaps by N*Sync. They've always had MP3s and have no idea that MTV used to show videos.

OTOH - yes, I recognize the irony of using that contraction - we have seen music morph from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to digital. Movies have become things we went to theaters to see to videotapes to DVD to hi-def. (I'm watching "Rattle & Hum" on HD DVD and realize that U2 has passed from relevance to annoying caricature on my watch.) I'm typing this on a laptop that would've been science fiction at any price a decade ago. The 1s and 0s that made "Tron" now make "Ratatouille" a mere quarter-century later. A $400 videogame console can render more at 60 fps that what used to take a couple hours per FRAME to generate using million-dollar supercomputers. Old Industries have collapsed and new paradigms are attempting to rise from the wreckage - not that the Boomers trapped beneath the rubble are helping or happy about it. Gen Whine just awaits the next toy and wouldn't know what to do if you handed them a real Scrabble board.

Today's brats only see the pretty whirring lights and sensations of our time, but have no idea that beyond their beautiful house they should ask themselves, "Well, how did I get here?" They stand at the plate and think they scored a home run and saunter back to the dugout to collect their high-fives. They think that no one will see their photos of them in their tutus with their cool wands. Ironically, for all that they think they're thinking, they are not thinking at all. They are the embodiment of their Boomer creators' programming to be dutiful citizens of the world and comfortable with using mob rule to transfer resources in the name of "fairness". (That whirring sound you're hearing is George Orwell spinning in his grave. We should hook him up to a generator and get some benefit from his unrest.)

Since ignorance is a curable disease, the question becomes whether it is possible to deprogram so many of these hoodie-wearing entitlement queens or whether we push them into the Grand Canyon and bury them as a cautionary tale and indictment that not all of us did that great job ourselves. Hmmmm. It's hard to say, but righting the ship starts as soon as we are willing to tell the pampered princes and princesses of this meaninglessly-named cohort, "LIFE IS NOT FAIR!!! SUCK IT UP, YOU LITTLE BRATS!!!"

Thus concludes this rant. So say we all.

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UPDATE: Business Week has a list of "Ten Reasons Gen Xers Are Unhappy at Work" which dovetails nicely into this discussion, especially #9: "[I]f Boomer colleagues are annoying, the Boomer parents of your Y reports are down-right over-the-top."

This LOLCAT pretty much sums up Gen Whine parents:


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