One generation of Americans has been called “The Greatest Generation” for the notable accomplishments of beating back The Great Depression, Fascism, winning the Second World War, sending humans into space, defending the world from Communism and other forms of authoritarianism, and putting in place a worldwide political and economic system amongst nations that has spread prosperity, reduced global poverty and avoided further great power wars. That generation left much more to do, but their list of accomplishments is significant.
Then there has been another generation. This one doesn’t like being told what to do, even in cases of global threat to life in the form of pandemic and a warming globe, encroaching authoritarianism, and corruption of democracy, threatening the way of life won for us by The Greatest Generation. Freedom from violence, discrimination, want, and oppression are secondary for this other generation to MY guns, MY rights, MY truck, My cartoon characters, MY favorite children’s books, MY comfortable sense of life, MY money, MY neighborhood, MY yard, MY parties, MY belief in fairy tales, MY rebel flag, MY desire to have an old, ugly white grifter as MY president, and maybe worst of all, to only have MY “people” have rights of any kind.
What, pray tell, might this other generation be called? It surely is not great, surely not good, likely not adequate to the tasks and not commensurate with the exaggerated value this generation sees in itself. They puff themselves up, scream of FREEDUMB, wear their silly flag clothes, claim identity with the patriots of the Revolution, shake a self-righteous fist that proclaims a Jesus and a God that Jesus and God wouldn’t recognize, defend one amendment of the US Constitution perverted to their aims while actively destroying every other part of that same Constitution.
I propose that we have The Whiniest Generation. Everything is someone else’s fault, they are sorely put-upon, and their ideal world is being degraded by all those OTHER people. THEY don’t look like US, THEY don’t pray like US, THEY don’t think like US, THEY like things that WE don’t, THEY do things that WE don’t like. THEY don’t deserve to have any of the same rights WE do, THEY don’t deserve anything, THEY should have to work up from zero to have a reasonable way of life (that WE have been given without effort, genius or merit, simply an accident of birth), THEY need to learn the values that WE shout out loud but don’t actually have, and THEY should learn to stay in their place.
The Whiniest Generation reveres uniforms and fetishizes military ways, talking in that little military jargon and dressing up in their little uniforms and kit with their bellies distending the gear beyond any military flair, and carrying more weapons than could be used in anything other than full-scale battle, the Whiniest Generation’s collective wet-dream nightmare. It’s a nightmare to them because they are basically cowards, incompetent with grandiose dreams, huge neuroses, and tiny little brains. Stupid is as stupid does, Mama said.
Little to admire, much to loathe, more to fear, does the Whiniest Generation become free America’s last generation? Fools, crackpots, tin hats, grifters…whiners all. They’ve fallen far from the Greatest Generation that they venerate who would have nothing to do with the Whiniest.
That the Whiniest Generation is two generations removed from the Greatest Generation, and a political-economic cycle removed from great dreams, great attempts, and some great elevations of people seems to be worth thinking about...on another day.
Today, I’m just tired of whiners and I’d really like to swat them, and tell them to go sit in their corner until they can act like real human beings.