History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. – Unattributed
The Curmudgeon stands on his soapbox:
Doomed? Maybe for a while. Give up? Impossible!
I’ve been told I’m doomed before. I got used to it. I’m still here.
People who can’t do a damned thing are the doomed ones. They’re crosswise with reality. They refuse to fix themselves. They could become a person who works within reality but they chose pretense over substance. Self-improvement requires acknowledging you aren’t perfect already. Thus, they can’t improve.
They want me to feel hopeless. They think it’ll make me like them. It won’t. I can’t be hopeless because I’m not helpless.
Their mistakes are willful. Their failure is inevitable.
It must be hell.
I observe (from the greatest distance I can muster) a nation writhing in misery. It sweats and curses through the long dark fever dreams of change. Reality refuses to comport with the internally contradicted mindscape of an “elite”. Something has to give.
The “elite” is neither skilled nor honorable nor accomplished; in fact they’re anything but elite. Mere courtiers, our “elite” can do little to help the fevered nation; if indeed they even want to. They can censor or delve into the minutiae of fashion but they can’t deal with debt, inflation, restore the rule of law, or even plant a garden.
They avoid introspection with the brittle anger of the corrupt. Surely, if the rule of law were restored, their network of spiderwebs, intrigue, and corruption would fall at their feet… returning them to their proper status of irrelevant. When you pretend to be elite it’s a hard lesson to find out you’re not even average.
Their fear is poignant. What is a failed human to do? Withered cat-ladies and corrupt paper pushers the world over stare into the abyss. They have built nothing. They’ve torn asunder all they touch. They must cling to their fake beliefs or reality will burn them to the bone.
Through all this I’m uncharacteristically optimistic. I’ve seen incompetent morons screw the nation into the ground. I’ve seen it rise again. Can it do so forever? Probably not. Can it get off the canvas one more time? I think so.
I’m GenX. My lot is the ignored generational rounding error that grew up feral during a childhood of being told we were doomed. Do I sit on my ass bitching about it? Nah, it’s just a thing that happened, no need to let it hold me back. A childhood of impending global thermonuclear war, oil crises, bad music, and worse leadership caused us to be cynical and hard but we’re not beaten.
Like current GenZ, we had society’s original sin laid directly on our shoulders. We too were told we’d eat bugs. We too were told Communism would defeat us all. We too were told the climate was our fault. GenX was told our very existence meant an unavoidable Malthusian death spiral to famine and death. GenZ had an autistic Swedish high-school drop out shrieking at the UN. She said basically the same shit. Of course, the human wastes at the UN gave her an ovation; how could they not?
I remember reports from New York City in 1970s… or any city really. I hear of them today. Eerily similar. It sounds to me like regression to the mean.
When I was a young man, sporting an excellent mullet and dreams I’d somehow own a car during the future oil famine, there was a song. “A Country Boy Can Survive”.
It took my cohort by storm. We were, after all, country boys.
Notice what we wanted? Survive. That’s it! All we wanted to do was survive. Just doing that… surviving… was a goal and a rallying cry.
Ours wasn’t the screaming malice of a purple haired, pierced, tattooed, human slurry of social justice warriors. We weren’t hell bent to change the world. We didn’t want to burn history to the ground. We didn’t want to bring about a Utopia in our image. We wanted only to persist.
Oddly that was a rebellious concept. It was a big shock that we might actually do it… to persist.
I sat by a campfire with similar aged friends and we sang happily “a country boy can survive, because you can’t starve us out and you can’t make us run, because them old boys raised on shotguns”. Then, because we were kids before the safety Nazis, we threw a disposable lighter in the fire to see what would happen.
So, that’s GenX. The cynical ones who persisted. We’re oddly optimistic because we’ve seen waves of bullshit come, crest, and then ebb. Especially this is true of rural GenX; the rounding error of ignored flyover country. When Hank Williams Jr. ranted “you only get mugged if you go downtown” he wasn’t saying he was happy that the cities were a mess. Only acknowledging they were.
That was 1982. We were wading through Fauchi’s first epidemic freakout called AIDS. Right now the nation is still reeling from his second round. (Covid is like Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior. The sequel was far more powerful than the initial movie.)
My young self saw inflation as does the nation today. I knew it was baked in the cake sometime in 2008 but then again so did an entire political movement.
I could go on, with examples from foreign affairs, societal upheaval, corruption in government, etc… but I’m going to cut this short and focus on a silly little song. Hank Williams Jr. did his best to encapsulate a rural people who’s stability, honor, and even survival was threatened… and added to it a war cry “you will not defeat us”.
There’s a new song for our current movie of “Fuckery Part 2, Clownworld Strikes Back”. It’s called “Try That In A Small Town”.
Is it a perfect song? Nah. Is it a small piece of GenZ doing what a small piece of GenX did? I think so.
Incidentally, I can skin a buck but I prefer a crankbait to a trot line. And I have survived.
Take a deep breath and observe the world’s ways. Losers are always doomed. Losers always hate self-reliance. Losers kill hope when they can. This is nothing new.
Fish traps, easy to make easy to use. I’ve eaten many a “bait fish” stew with swamp onions and cattail potatoes.
Listening to some podcast about 80s music, the question was raised on why there is currently wave of 80s nostalgia, with modern teenagers into the songs of that time. The proposed explanation was that it was a simpler time, when things weren’t so difficult or complicated, and people didn’t have all the worries they do now.
I then listed pretty much everything you did regarding how miserable it was to come of age in the 80s, with the impending end of the world, civilization, and/or humanity coming any minute now, from any of 8 different sources (I think you missed that we’d be out of electricity by 2000 and living in the cold and dark). Not to say we didn’t still have a good time then, but anyone who thinks it was all unicorns, rainbows, and Journey wasn’t there.
Even a friend of mine who was in high school in the 70s said she felt sorry for the 80s kids because, “At least when I was in school, you could tell if someone had a disease by looking at them.”
Yes folks default to “it was the good old days” without thinking of of times of peace and times of chaos. Probably there are cycles of time that suck every few generations. I think the younger GenZ kids who missed two years of middle school to masks and closed schools took a hit. They will grow up with some very cold “when I was a kid” stories. When everyone loses their shit kids aren’t old enough to know it’s just people being stupid and that people being stupid doesn’t mean things are that bad. The good news is, just like GenX, they can get used to getting the short end of the stick and get along just fine.
I also think social media and ubiquitous cell phones is hitting as hard as the Gutenberg press. I’m sure people 50 years from now will have mental armor built into their being. A necessity that we lack.