PicoBlog

It's interesting that you bring up this idea of the 30's being this great demarcation of generations. I don't think you're wrong. The Boomer ethos has been from the beginning steeped in the idea of perpetual adolescence. Even when the Flower Power, Counter-Culture Boomers moved into being "the adults" in the Reagan years, they still never quite... solidified, in a way. They never really accepted the fact that they were getting old and needed to take things seriously. If you look at how the Boomer-dominated government handles pretty much everything and has more or less sold the future of their descendants out from under them for their own gain, I'd say they never have, and now it's too late to do anything even if they suddenly and inexplicably decide to change course. I see the same sort of hesitancy to embrace age and experience in pretty much every generation since - it's all about pretending that the inevitable isn't happening. And, trust me, I get why we are, I'm certainly no paragon of accepting the fact I'm getting old, but as one of my favorite tweets ever says, "Aging is not 1% as scary as whatever the fuck is wrong with the people who do everything they possibly can to try and not age". And, yes, it trickles down into puerile discourse of two equally unserious and juvenile camps of ideologues spouting stale memes at one another. Like, there was a time I used to think the "Yes" meme with the blonde chad guy with the beard was funny, but holy fuck every time I see that stupid ass picture now I just know I'm about to see what's likely the worst opinion or take I'll read the entire day. I just don't see how either side of the political blocs will ever really make any progress if they continue to act like petulant kids antagonizing each other on a school yard.

I would also agree that we have, as a society, lost the ability to imagine anything other than a neo-liberal, industrialized, capitalistic civilization. I'm not saying that those qualities aren't better than the alternative - I'll take neo-liberal industrialized capitalism over living under the thumb of a despotic Mesopotamian God-King and eating dirt any day - but we also can't seem to get past it. Every solution offered to modern problems are the same solutions offered in the 1900's, to a fundamentally different time, place, people, and society. Like, there's a lot of people on the right who idealize Fascism, right? Well, Fascism was a 20th century solution to 20th century problems. I don't think Fascism, Communism, or any of the conventional political ways of thinking that defined the 20th Century are going to succeed in fixing the issues of the 21st Century, especially as things continue so rapidly changing and the 20th sinks further back into the rear-view mirror.

Also, even though I live north of the Mason-Dixon these days, I'm still a Southerner at heart. I kind of hate it for a lot of reasons, but it's also home, and it's engenders this feeling of, "Yeah, it sucks, but it's my home, and only I can talk shit about it because I actually live there". While the Southern US has been much degraded for a myriad of reasons and rightly does have a stigma of poverty, ignorance, and racial prejudice, it's really, REALLY not as bad as the Yankee propaganda would have people believe. And the thing about Whitener is, as a Southerner himself, he would know that. Asheville, where he lives, is notoriously progressive - a bright blue beacon of progressive ideology in the ruby red south. He should know damn well not everyone that lives south of the Mason-Dixon is a backwards rube. And he does, I'm sure, but at the same time, he has to stab his own culture and people in the back to make in-roads with the fellow travelers he wants to impress. If I sound heated, it's because that kind of mealy-mouthed duplicity sits particularly poorly with me.

I actually don't think we've returned to the median after a respite - I think the 1970's to 2010's were the norm, and now are the anomalous times. The majority of the population of any given country can NOT be so politically charged. It leads to major instability and unrest and, eventually, collapse - which is exactly what we're seeing now. If anything, I think the "live and let live" laisse faire attitude of the past where most people did have political convictions but didn't let it define them is something we direly need to return to. The current way of hyper-politicized fuckin' EVERYTHING is simply unsustainable.

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