Generations

Many generations come and go, growing fat and old, dying in their beds at an advanced age and being mourned by the disconnected brats who sneered every time they got a $5 bill from them for Christmas... Life to them was a happy land full of Tupperware in avocado tones, huge land barges filled to the brim with .50 cent gasoline, little bitty houses in neighborhoods complete with the cheery milkman, and few huge, lingering concerns. Dilema to them was having your cake go flat in the stove or getting a flat tire on your Rambler on the way to a bridge game...

My generation was, and is, marked by the chaos that it was born into. As our illusion culture begins its decline and subsequent dive into the abyss, many of us look into the future and see a black hole instead of the rainbows and unicorns previous generations envisioned. I myself find it hard to see a future that doesn't end with a one-way trip to the afterlife on a 5.56 NATO round, postage paid by my own tax dollars... Imagining retirement, hell even picturing life after 40 is difficult to say the least, and the few times the though has managed to break the impending doom barrier the picture that is there is one of unending servitude at some pathetic slave-wage job, working to pay the ever-expanding bills and weighing the merits of needed medications vs food. Simply put, I am damned.

Even if the foreseen end never came, the dream is over for us. Work two jobs, never see the wife because she's at work too, get a mediocre peeling chrome-plated plastic life instead of playing Ward Cleaver and having one job that supports the family AND pays for the house, this is the legacy we are dealt... Our society's destruction is in progress, and the shadow of a new Dark Age comes to place ALL of humanity into chains. We have no representatives, we are tax-raped into financial submission and squeezed between ever-shortening hours at piss-poor wages and ever-increasing prices for necessities... The Baby Boomers lay back and suckle at the sagging teat of government, content with getting their fair share - and more, as always - without complaint, ever the complacent "rebels", eager to vote away our generations for a little fatter Social Security check. The next (de)generation walks zombified through the world texting their way through life and idolizing generic stars who fill the digital television noiseboxes with hollow songs and meaningless expressions... We are damned, jammed squarely between two selfish and disconnected generations who are actually eager to have the iron fist that is crushing us all take care of them at our expense! The elders, content with taking all they can and dying with the old dream in tatters, the youngers trained since birth to gleefully accept the narrow constraints of a more totalitarian, more socialist lifestyle "in the name of Gaia".

We know we're getting a raw deal. The Boomers know it too but could give a fuck less, "rebels" that they are... Most of them will die fat, happy, and coddled at 75 or 80 in a comfortable bed, and most of us will get to die at 28 or 34 in the streets so they can have the kind of government which will give them that comfortable bed for free. The newer kids are too doped up by the schools to give a fuck either way... Of course, their lack of concern is not totally their fault so hopefully they will find some manner of mercy within the grinding gears of The System, and they won't lament the rights that were taken from them too much.

Sometimes I wish I could have just maintained the illusion. A life of blissful ignorance with an unexpected "rapid cessation" does seem to have more appeal than a long, drawn-out existence with knowledge of impending doom...