fierceawakening:

funereal-disease:

For the longest time I thought the whole “generation wars” stuff was kind of a tongue-in-cheek society-wide in-joke, like the Mandela Effect or “2016 is cursed”. You know, something that provides a useful framework occasionally, something it’s fun to suspend disbelief for once in a while, but that no one really takes seriously. “Oh, Boomers do X and Millennials do Y, damn kids get off my lawn, what’s the deal with airplane peanuts, etc.”

I’m now finding myself more and more weirded out by how incredibly, almost vitriolically seriously people on both “sides” seem to take the generational divide. It’s like watching people get really into astrology or Myers-Briggs, except people who are really into astrology or Myers-Briggs don’t usually write aggressive thinkpieces about how Capricorns are ruining the country. I’m seeing these incredibly long and detailed Tumblr posts about all the ways Millennials are Fundamentally Different from Boomers and how they Just Don’t Understand. Off Tumblr, media is more slanted in Boomers’ favor, but both “sides” (again, I hate using that word) totally uncritically ape the idea that generation gaps are absolute and inherent. All those viral rebuttals you see are just shifting which group comes out on top. There’s nothing complicating the idea of bullshit generation war in the first place.

As though Millennials are the first generation to be defined by political or economic instability! As though the Leave It to Beaver suburban nuclear family ideal Boomers are constantly accused of being stuck in was ever universal in any meaningful way, rather than an innovation of a very particular set of circumstances! You really think this is the first generation to live in tension with dying industries? Read up on the Panic of 1873 and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Industries boom and bust and become obsolete. Workers struggle to adjust and eventually migrate to new fields. I swear it’s like some of these thinkpiece authors think this is the first economic flux ever.

The idea that Americans lived in middle-class prosperity until Boomers screwed it all up and consigned Millennials to part-time jobs and delayed homeownership is laughable. It’s ahistorical, and it’s just plain erasure of the migrant workers and wage laborers and perpetual tenants in every generation. Working the same job for 60 years and buying a house by 30 is not the natural state of the world. It’s the case for some people in some very particular circumstances. Both sides of the Boomers vs. Millennials discourse seem to consistently forget this. On the one hand, you’ve got cranky Fox News types whining that kids just don’t try hard enough these days; on the other, you’ve got hipsters whining that no one’s ever had to have five roommates before. Both of these arguments assume that middle-class nuclear suburban living is the natural state of things and that anything else is somehow a perversion, and each side is blaming the other for perverting it.

As though young singles weren’t sharing rooms in boardinghouses in 1917. As though working-class fathers didn’t have to take whatever menial gigs came their way. I’m not saying that “natural” equals “good”, mind, and I’m certainly not saying people should stop complaining about economic inequality because the natural state is living ten to a bed in a tenement or something. I’m not talking about what’s ethical, I’m talking about what happened, and I’m talking about the ways that everyone involved in this discourse needs to step back and recalibrate. There is so much empathy to be found here. So much common ground. And that will never be remotely accomplished if we keep flinging ahistorical shit.

Oh my lord this. It makes me ill.

Mitch McConnell is not some nightmarish representation of your parents’ unholy id, guys.

Nor is your daughter jobless because she’s lazy, people.