My Generation Is Contemptible (But So Is Yours)

I'm a member of Generation X, the cohort of latchkey kids who arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s through the late 1970s. While I do share certain traits with my generational peers -- dysfunctional childhood, cynicism, and an independent streak -- I couldn't stand most of these people when growing up and can barely tolerate them now. After all, their overriding trait is not to take anything seriously, a slacker outlook that they deem the essence of cool. This mindset reeks of smugness, presuming that all the great mysteries of life have been solved and that the noblest objective is to chill out and have a good time. People who give off any sort of piety or sincerity are viewed with suspicion, to be mocked at best and shunned at worst. Basically, Gen-Xers are a bunch of spoiled brats who look down their noses on a society that made boredom and disillusionment their greatest challenges.

Generation Y and/or the Millennials -- those born from the start of the 1980s through the late 1990s -- are contemptible in their own right. They are too shallow to be independent or cynical; quite the contrary, they are corporate America's wet dream because they are Pollyannish "team players" through and through. It's refreshing that they don't retreat into smug slackerdom as my generation has done, but they too have no convictions about anything. Apart from that, they have the attention span of a gnat and are functionally illiterate, having grown up on a diet of technological distractions that renders any abstraction or reflection impossible.

What about the Baby Boomers? Please. This is the generation that bankrupted America in every way imaginable, be it financially, culturally, or spiritually. We can thank Baby Boomers for open borders, affirmative action, the EPA, decadent music, rampant abortions, the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, skyrocketing crime, expelling God from education, and many other ills that are too depressing to tabulate. Even worse, the Boomers view themselves as heroic for having perpetrated these outrages.

As for their parents, the Greatest Generation, I admit they paid their dues with interest by having to deal with the Great Depression and World War II. What makes them contemptible is that, despite having helped defeat fascism abroad, they gleefully embraced it here at home with FDR's New Deal, a fascistic power grab that was cloaked (as always) in the language of idealism. The Four Freedoms were offensive on their face and should have been rejected; there is no such thing as freedom from want or freedom from fear, and that generation disgraced its ancestors by asking Leviathan to bestow such "freedoms."  America never has been the same, as the welfare state became a permanent cancer that has grown only larger and deadlier ever since. It's impossible now even to question the slew of unconstitutional restraints and wealth transfers stemming from that era; both major political parties take these offenses as a given, and I'll wager that most surviving members of the Greatest Generation would express pride in this dismal fact.

So what generation do I respect? None living, that much is certain. If Calvin Coolidge was the last president who strikes me as halfway decent, there is little chance I'm going to find much to praise in the people who have elected every president ever since.