The Confusatory

Generation X Can Get Bent

I’ve had a lot of drafts floating in my head about how badly the world is broken, and how fixing it will require my parents’ generation getting the hell out of the way. Now that a snippy little post called Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It is making its rounds, it’s as good a time as any to talk about the world from the next generation’s perspective. We’re not entitled assholes, we’re just fatalistic, cynical, undereducated kids in a fucked-up world.

… Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.) Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that.

So in return, Generation X fucked every future generation. You lacked the meagre political will required to address urgent and upcoming issues, like climate change and a total failure of financial regulation. You looted the public coffers to fund your pensions and retirements, and didn’t follow through on your parents’ investment in infrastructure and research. You took the budding pharmaceutical industry and lost yourself in boners instead of anti-retroviral drugs, and got fat and lazy and bent the world’s food and energy supplies to feed your waistlines and your big cars.

Generation X is a journeyman. It didn’t invent hip hop, or punk rock, or even electronica (it’s pretty sure those dudes in Kraftwerk are boomers) but it perfected all of them, and made them its own. It didn’t invent the Web, but it largely built the damn thing. Generation X gave you Google and Twitter and blogging; Run DMC and Radiohead and Nirvana and Notorious B.I.G. Not that it gets any credit.

Well aren’t you so damned cool.

In fairness, Generation X could use a better spokesperson. Barack Obama is just a little too senior to count among its own, and it has debts older than Mark Zuckerberg. Generation X hasn’t had a real voice since Kurt Cobain blew his brains out, Tupac was murdered, Jeff Mangum went crazy, David Foster Wallace hung himself, Jeff Buckley drowned, River Phoenix overdosed, Elliott Smith stabbed himself (twice) in the heart, Axl got fat.

Quitters. Generation X couldn’t hack it, so you mic’ed out.

Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone. It just wants to sit here quietly and think for a minute.

Aww, you can’t handle the stress? The impending societal breakdown? The unsolved crises, the forced admittance of your mistakes? Then get the fuck out of our way. We’re going to have to declare bankruptcy, take back your pensions (jesus, do you all not understand how basic accounting works? Oh wait, if you’d funded education instead of cutting it to the bone, maybe you’d know how math works), cut your retirement benefits, and try to salvage what’s left of the world. Thanks for a shitload of houses in useless places, crumbling roads, and a trillion dollar war (you assholes elected both Bushes, let’s not forget).

You did a hell of a job trashing the car, but if you really need a congratulatory pat on the back to go with your quiet moment, well, thanks for not losing the keys?