If I were to use a sporting analogy to describe the current state of my life cycle I would have to say, back nine, seventh inning, fourth quarter or third period. My attitude is dictated by all of the experiences I’ve accumulated on the front nine or the first two periods.
In that time of accumulated life experiences I’ve had to deal with some ugly shit. Wars and tsunamis and the usual litany of human induced misery and calamity. However, at least for the front nine of my life there was an underlying sense of wonder and maybe even some optimism. I existed before the social media shitshow that has drowned the world in attention seeking idiots, about half of whom are standard bearers for negativity, conspiracy and snarling hostility.
Not so for the Zoomers. They haven’t had many rays of sunshine without an attached warning to wear their sunscreen. I remember watching early documentaries and marveling at the Attenborough narration of the Great Barrier Reef or the plains of the Serengeti, but the zoomers documentary channel experience has been nothing like mine.
Instead of wonder they’ve been bombarded with the consequences of all the fuck ups of the generations that have preceded them. Every nature documentary they’ve seen isn’t about the majesty of the marine life, but rather about how humans have pretty much fucked up everything. We ate the whales, destroyed the reefs with shrimp trawlers and poached all the rhino’s for dick hardening powder.
And the permanent apprehension isn’t limited to reefs and Rhino’s. Everything in their life experience to date is a bloody crisis. Climate crisis, humanitarian crisis, water crisis, housing crisis, meth crisis, technological crisis, and pandemic crisis are only the tip of the melting iceberg crisis.
So, I don’t think that anyone should be surprised that the bombardment of negative news is eventually going to produce another crisis. A potentially generation wide personality disorder. In fact, I honestly think the twenty something generation should consider renaming themselves the Doomers.
This generation has grown up with a steady fare of apocalyptic scenarios that are so common that even entertainment has jumped onto the bad news bandwagon. In days of yore there were a movie or two that dealt with an envisioning of the end of times. Now every second movie has a dystopian theme, and I’m convinced that an entire generation has been so saturated with foreboding that another crisis is the result.
A crisis of attitude.
And to add to their generational anxiety we’ve got to factor in the helplessness component, because the entire generation is too young and too powerless to do anything about it. Instead, the decisions are in the hands of eighty year old politicians and seventy year old billionaires who aren’t going to have to endure the results of their myopic self service.
And I think in that scenario, I’d have a bit of an attitude problem too. A perspective problem that has very little to do with entitlement and quite a bit to do with resentment. It pisses me off every time I hear some asshole whine about the entitlement of the doomers. Yes, they may have been handed a thing or two that previous generation didn’t have. But are cell phones and video games a fair trade for living a life that’s perpetually in one crisis or another?
It could just be me, but I’ll wager that the doomers would trade the latest version of Grand Theft Auto for the opportunity to not have to deal with an eighth plastic continent in the Pacific.
I’m not suggesting that an eighteen year old fresh off a skateboard is the political leader that we’re looking for. But an eighty year old with a diaper isn’t the answer either. Maybe split the difference and put a candidate in place that has a plethora of experience to draw from, and can still remember those experiences. Because in my estimation being an elder with wisdom isn’t an asset if dementia is getting in the way of all that wisdom.
I can say with some confidence that the current state of political discourse isn’t providing any relief to the doomers. Instead of agreeing that we have a few problems to deal with, we spend all of our time arguing about if the problems even exist, and that stupidity just adds to their anxiety about their future.
So, picture an average twenty year old. Lacking in experience or not, they’re aware of the reality of the physical world. They can count the hurricanes, floods and tornado’s and see the homeless people. All the American twenty year olds have participated in active shooter drills since grade school. Rain is now almost always accompanied by a warning of potential golf ball sized hail and torrential downpours. Assuming that there’s any rain at all to douse the wildfires burning out of control.
They can see all the methheads. They can hear the gunfire and they can smell the smoke. Yet half the adults with the capacity to do something about it are telling them that their senses are being manipulated. That the leftists and environmentalist are conning them with hoaxes designed to somehow limit their freedoms.
Meanwhile, those same hoax advocates are limiting their reproductive rights, the books they can read, and their ability to vote. Because according to those particular role models, the world needs more people, but only some of them can vote and have healthcare. Because Jesus would want it that way.
I always wonder about the mindset of the religious who support capital punishment but still claim every life is sacred. A mindset that demands fornication be exclusively performed to produce babies without a plan to make sure those babies are fed, clothed and educated.
A mindset that has never wondered what Jesus would think if they got their way and the messiah was born again. A mindset that won’t even consider that the Nazarene might look around and say, Dad dammit the flock is out of control. They’ve eaten all the grass, and you can’t take a step without the shit the sheep have left behind oozing over my sandals and into my toes.
Because when you look at all of the problems facing the twenty year olds you’d think someone might logically conclude that all of our variations of future dystopia are because we have too many people. So, instead of sorting out our breeding problem ourselves, we destroy the planet until the planet destroys us. Or depending on your perspective, Jesus’s Dad decides that a biblical planet wide whacking is in order.
Because of sin or something.
It seems to me that somewhere in our hive mind that we’ve already accepted that we’re going to fornicate our way into an apocalypse. It seems pretty self evident when you see doom deniers attacking weather men, and anti-vaccine tards telling everyone to not trust science. Again, it could just be me but it looks like all the indicators are pointing toward a significant thinning of the herd.
And the doomers are looking to the elders in the room to see what efforts are being pursued to ensure their future.
And they see Donald Trump and Marge. They see Putin and Tucker and Joe fucking Rogan.
So, I think that any attitude that they possess is not of their making. The problem for me is I’m not sure whether to teach them to be activists or to train them on how to be survivalists.
Probably both teachings are in order. But what a mindset to have to possess. An obligation of working for environmental and social awareness with a hint of optimism, and at the same time acquiring weapons training fueled by a healthy dose of pessimism.
I hope the doomers are up to the challenge, and if it seems like they’re hard to figure out then maybe we need to try and envision a day or two walking in their Jordans. Because we’ve run up a tab and they’re the ones that are going to have to pay.