When Bill and Joyce Get Through with You, You Won't Know Whether to Shit or Go Sailing.

We've lived through a lot of stuff we didn't expect in the last several years, like Texas freezing to death, worldwide bat pox and a four-year hostage-taking by the ascendancy of boomer nihilism in its most distilled form, which was totally unsurprising except maybe in how unexpectedly orange-tinted it turned out to be.

The most frustrating thing about human calamity is the more-human tendency to try to make it worse by inventing new sub-crises within it. Maybe it's an attempt to cope with the intractable by making up a problem that is obviously solvable because its contours are limited by the imaginations of the people who invented them, helped all the moreso as these engineers tend to be fucking stupid.

This is how you arrive at a social movement dedicated to the defeat of vaccines, the single most beneficial public health advance in the history of human civilization. The tightening fingercuffs of a problem here of course is that a problem invented by fucking stupid people also tends to be impervious to any serious-minded attempt to solve it or--and this is more important--any logical attempt to demonstrate that the problem simply never existed in the first place.

This is also how you arrive at the idea that there's a crisis of "cancel culture," that is somehow a threat to... people who are racist in public? Ideas born in eras where gay panic was a legitimate defense to murder a homosexual? Serial rapists? I'm not really sold on the downside here.

The idea that we've invented the idea of shouting at people until they go away is ludicrous on its face, but "ludicrous" is not a sufficient grounds for dismissal in 2021. The pushback of course is centered around the old, the white, the privileged... the classic Fox News demographic, now in a panic with their id-avatar defeated and sent away in the last election, leaving them exposed to the whims of the horde.*

I'm in my mid-late 40s now, I own a house, I've got college-aged kids, I've got a 401k and a gas grill in my back yard. I'm a cis-hetero-white dude with cis-hetero-white dude children. I've got gray hair and high cholesterol. I definitely look like I'm ripe for recruiting into the army reactionary hate-patriots. And I know this because the Murdoch press is actively trying to recruit me. 

Not me specifically, but my generational cohort, your formerly lamented, mostly forgotten Generation X. The full-court press by the home-court press only lasted about a quarter of the news cycle because, as we've proven over and over again, Generation X is practically impervious to giving a fuck about the noise-only scrum of the culture wars. We haven't proven to be the wealthiest or the healthiest or the smartest or most accomplished, but above any other demographic subset, we've proven to be the most allergic to bullshit.

It's been our job to quietly clean up after the chaos caused by the neglect and narcissism and cultural blindness (tacit, implicit, stated, shouted, all the variants) of our parents. We're the unattended raised by the unexamined, a tragic social irony given the boomers' over-earned reputation for only being interested in themselves. Every childhood in some ways is a collection of PTSDs as the formative brain accepts the deepest impressions from the pressures implied, better or worse. Collectively ours were formed, more than any other group, by a group of sellouts, drunks and liars investing 18 years gaslightling us into believing the best thing for them was coincidentally in every single instance also the best thing for the family, for the country and all of human society at the same time.

We know the boomers have fucked this all up. And the fallout seems to be getting worse down the generations past us. The worst thing about Gen X is we know by now that nothing we do is going to fix any of it. Any of it. And the absolute worst, most galling, most unintentionally hilarious thing to try would be to try to gaslight us again into trying to defend the world they broke for us, and on terms they dictate. We've been to enough terrible Thanksgivings to fucking know better.

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*People who vote.