#generational solidarity

[docmothra]

look. all im saying is that skibidi ohio may be a horrendous, bizarre headache. but thats the point. its like saving a toddler's first drawing. is it terrible? absolutely. Does that make it worse? not at all. because the point isnt the quality of the art, the point is keeping a monument to a brand new living person's newborn ability to create. and in the same way when every generation gets horrible, terrible, incomprehensible words. Like swell. and jeez. and so's your old man. and skibidi ohio rizzler amogus sus. and when those get integrated, irrevocably, into language- and thus culture- and thus art- and thus dreams- and thus choices- and thus the future of every little thing- it is a monument to the fact that human life is not an endless marathon, but an endless relay race, and sometimes someone signs the baton, and i think that's kind of beautiful.

[icarus-suraki]

I’ve noticed an interesting Boomer behavior recently and it’s claiming a certain experience as theirs and theirs alone. For example:

I’m what you call a “geriatric Millennial”--that is, I’m part of the older cohort of Millennials, the X-lennials as we’re sometimes called. So I have quite a few friends who are only a little older than me but solidly Gen X. 

Gen Xers of late have been saying, “If you’re Gen Z or a Millennial and this is your first World-War-III-with-Russia scare, get a Gen Xer. They’ll tell you all about how they planned for nuclear annihilation while eating the dinner they made for themselves.” And all the Gen Xers I know are saying, “yeah, it’s true: my friends and I never thought we’d live past 25, so now we have no idea how to be older.” In college, they majored in things they enjoyed because, eh, why worry about careers when you’re not going to be alive? There’s a real nihilism to Gen X.

Meanwhile, my parents, undeniable Boomers, think this is ridiculous because, as my dad said, “No one was worried about nuclear war by then. By the 1970s even, no one was worried about nuclear war.” The 1980s, to them, were the go-go 80s, the yuppie era, the “greed is good” ere--or at least that was the zeitgeist they experienced. They claim that, as children in the 1950s and early 1960s, they were the ones who worried about nuclear war, not anyone else. 

And, sure, in the 1950s, the whole nuclear war, bomb shelter, duck-and-cover stuff was a major thing and it gets trotted out as one of the major aspects of the era, I get it. 

But even when I whip out all of these examples from the 1980s (and late 1970s to some degree) of nuclear war imagery--Genesis, “Land of Confusion” and Killing Joke, “80s,” both feature mushroom clouds, for example--to prove that there was a lot of nuclear anxiety in the 1980s, they just wave it off.

But NOPE!! Anxiety about nuclear annihilation (along with inflation, income stagnation, employment instability, rising housing costs, and everything else) is an exclusively Boomer thing. 

And I’m just like, okay, but all these Gen Xers say that they had this experience too? And yet...ignored!!

But, as my Gen X friends put it, they’ve always been ignored, so why would that change now? 

“Gen X: the key is under the mat and the pain is under the smirk.”

[brieslarvens]

my dad hates ronald reagan so I always send him anti ronald memes when I see them