Posts Tagged → chores
“OK Boomer” and other spoiled brat crap
No apologies at all today, this essay is a frustrated old man rant. And like most frustrated old men, I am certain this will be ignored by the vast majority of its audience, if not every single person for whom it is meant: You bratty kids who say “OK, Boomer” about everything you don’t like hearing from your elders, including frank universal truths that supposedly conservative adults embrace.
One of the great successes of America and the civilized West is our material wealth and comforts. Our poorest citizens generally live better than all of the poor people in most other countries as well as their middle income people; and our middle income citizens live better than almost everyone else across the planet.
We Americans have so much overabundant food that a lot of our citizens are fat, lazy, and pre-diabetic. And the fat and pre-diabetic Americans do not even have to work hard, physically or otherwise, to get a roof over their head and put food in the fridge. Many of us are practically sleep walking through life.
Our American people are largely being lulled to sleep by all this overabundance and daily over-indulgence. Very little effort is required to have nice things, a modern cell phone, a car, a roof over one’s head, as much food as you can eat any time you want it, endless entertainment and opportunities for personal expressions, etc
Life in America is not hard for a lot of our people, and in fact, life here is so good that it is almost too good. We have so much of every thing that the abundance is nearly killing us. Not just physically, but mentally, spiritually, culturally, too. Many Americans seem to be addicted to ease of life, easy living, easy everything, to the point where any minor hiccup in their life is cause for the now ubiquitous TikTok breakdown sob story video.
Guys (and many women) like me, who grew up at a time when Americans began working hard at age twelve or fourteen, who had daily chores to do as part of living in a family house, who every day felt personal duties and obligations beyond their/ our own personal desires and wants, who have a hard, tough core inside of us from having worked hard and sacrificed for long, we have a real tough time understanding or even empathizing with today’s young people. And by young, I mean up into the forties, sad to say.
And for guys like me, in particular, who grew up in rural places where hands-on chores in forests, the woodshed, and the farm yard were standard operating procedure, this disbelief we feel while watching American culture devolve into a giant cry-and-whine-fest, is a million times accentuated.
You weak little bastards.
See, like our own elders did before us, it was us elders who sacrificed so much for you young people. We who worked so hard to continue on the growing America that was handed to us. We who believe in hard work and diligence and deferring pleasure and gratification in lieu of achieving some important goal, personal or national. It is us who are disgsuted by the arrogant, dismissive, unappreciateive “OK, Boomer” quip from young people who a) Do not know how to work b) Do not want to work and c) Could not save their ass with both hands if it was handed to them on a silver platter.
We think “OK, Loser.”
Reputed conservatives, of all Americans, are the ones who shock me the most in this regard. Young people who brag how “religious” they are, and how traditional their conservative their beliefs are, are also the same ones casually dismissing us, their wise elders, while they get to either wallow in self pity over nothing, or, just as bad, start scapegoating other people for imaginary slights and failings that have nothing to do with where so many floundering young people find themselves today.
For tough old coots like me, the last generation with any connection to the original frontier lifestyle and values that created our America, the culture that serves you now, we elders, who know how to shoot a rifle and swing an axe and put up with personal insults without disintegrating into a pile of pathetic mush, you spoiled little brats look like the face of failure, all right. You look like you are going to drag down our beautiful America into complete and absolute failure once us tough old “OK, Boomer” adults are dead and gone or unable to put up a fight to save this great republic.
Get your shit together, kids, and work hard to get America on track to future success. Hard work is good for you. It makes you strong, it makes you tough, and it makes you appreciate the things that you get to own and call your own. Being tough means that you can survive when the going gets tough. Leverage the strong economy this current administration is brilliantly putting together for you.
No, socialism is not and has not been successful, anywhere or at any time it is tried. Socialism is for weak, lazy, losers; it is not for true Americans. And respecting your elders is still “a thing” the world around, in every traditional society. If you cannot show respect to us “Boomers,” then do not call yourself a conservative, or religious. Rather, you are just a slightly different anarchic leftist.
Rant done for now, and definitely not over. Ol’ Papa is just beginning to work up a good lather. You ungrateful, weak little shits.
Why socialism is now “cool”
Several years ago at a political candidate’s announcement event, an older woman came up to the candidate after his speech while I was standing next to him, and asked him to do something about how liberal colleges have become. I was close enough to both people to see their feelings.
“My grandson became a socialist and has disavowed everything his family has worked hard for since we moved here from Italy three generations ago,” she said, almost crying.
The Republican candidate seemed unmoved. Fighting socialist indoctrination on college campuses is probably not a big potential money maker for most would-be elected officials.
And no question about what she said, American colleges are now Ground Zero for socialist indoctrination and brainwashing. You can take a good kid from a solid loving, working home, with law-abiding working parents, a good work ethic, good grades, and a positive outlook on life, and within two semesters at pretty much any college in America, lose them to chic leftist radicalism. That is, socialism aka Everything that America is Not.
Which begs the question of Why.
My observation is socialism is popular because the younger generations have had to fight for nothing. They are spoiled rotten.
Everything has been given to them. Cars, expensive phones, expensive clothes, trips, freedom to come and go, time off from chores and work, peer-to-peer equal relationships with their parents and grandparents. As a consequence, America’s younger people are the world’s most spoiled little brats in the history of our planet. At their sixteenth birthday they are convinced they already know everything, including how the latest car racing simulator on XBox is actually – I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP – more realistic than actually driving (Yes, I really did hear a 16-year-old say this to his family recently).
As a result of being so spoiled and having no real meaningful adversity in their lives, the younger generations are looking for, searching for, adversity. Even if it means dreaming it up, inventing it out of thin air or out of bits and pieces of reality stitched together with bubblegum and bailing wire. It gives them a sense of meaning and purpose. And when they find it, it gives them a cause. Teenagers are nothing if not moral purists, and when they discover from their fake teachers that all of the money their parents worked hard for is actually stolen from living American Indians and ex-slave Blacks, they have discovered some adversity worth fighting against.
And off on the socialist crusade they go, filled with rage at their parents’ callous disregard for the poor and the suffering, the dispossessed.
The fact that their own grandparents disembarked from a boat into New York Harbor in 1948 with a grand total of a suitcase half-filled with clothes and the name of a nephew to their name doesn’t register. Or if you are from coal country, with your own grandparents telling you stories about how they and their parents worked in and around the coal mines, you are coached by a professor in “sociology” (yes, this is a real college thing, even though it is real nothing) to see your grandparents not as hard workers, but as exploited labor who enriched a bunch of wealthy aristocrats.
The entertainment industry is now the primary source for role models, values, and social cues, and add in some Hollywood movie virtue signalling, and we have now two generations of American kids who are spoiled, nearly worthless, unappreciative, un-grounded, disconnected from reality, and uninterested in anything except behaviors that make them feel good for the moment.
Even though my wife and I come from dramatically different backgrounds, we shared one common experience growing up that forms the foundation for our relationship: We had to work hard from a young age.
My wife made her own nice clothes for school, because neither she nor her parents could afford to buy nice clothes at the stores. And while I grew up splitting firewood daily from the age of nine, I had to work for my dad starting at age 14. Working on construction sites as the boss’s kid, doing all the worst jobs, got me plenty of abuse and socked arms by workers who wanted to put me in my place. I learned then to drink buckets of shit and just do my job, to the satisfaction of the meanest, grumpiest old worker on the crew. So now that I have been paying federal taxes since I was 14, I think I have a work ethic, and my wife does, too.
Like all of our friends our age (fifties), my wife and I actually enjoy working and seeing the fruits of our labors. But like our friends, we are dinosaurs, kind of the last of the dying breed. The last of the Americans. The next couple of generations seem to think that everything is supposed to be handed to them, and it seems they will cheerfully give away their unique American freedoms to a gigantic all-powerful government apparatus if it promises them mediocre “free” income and healthcare.
Not that our own kids aren’t great. They are, and I love them absolutely. Like most parents, we have done our best to raise them right. But I am afraid that college can warp even them, leading them to believe that socialism is the answer for the mean, exploitative parents who made them mow the lawn, take out the trash, and hang up the clean laundry.