Don’t shoot me yet, I promise I'm going to behave myself. In spite of the pornographic title, this post is actually going to be very insightful and culturally relevant. Specifically, I wanted to share some of my musings about the manner in which generations interact with each other.
As college students, we are all probably familiar with the hovering presence of parents and guardians, and the social complications that arise as a result of this. I don’t know how many times this week I’ve spoken to friends who spent upwards of five minutes bitching about some problem, which they invariably blamed on the previous generation. The tension experienced between loved ones typically ranges anywhere from money
(“Dude, my Mom won’t re-open my bank account until I promise to stop spending money on beer and strippers . . .”)
to relationships
(“Daddy doesn’t like him, just because he’s a Satanist. That’s discrimination, right?”)
to cars.
(“Shit, I only wrecked it twice, and the one time didn’t count because I was asleep . . .”)
At first glance, the entire relationship between generations appears to be rooted in a never-ending cycle of guilt and resentment. Parents feel vaguely responsible for these unpleasant creatures called teenagers that they accidentally brought into the world, and they attempt to assuage the guilt by feeding and clothing the little shitheads, and sending them to a nice Christian college in Arkansas where they won’t get into trouble. Teenagers, in return, feel vaguely responsible for all of the insanely expensive trouble they tend to cause. They will never actually modify their behavior – because they are shitheads – but they will probably tolerate their parent’s myriad perceived social idiocies in the hopes that one day all of the unpleasantness will quietly pass, and they will be able to transition out from under the umbrella of parenthood into the vast and mysterious place in life called the ‘real world’.
This is what network television will have you believe, anyway.
But none of it is exactly true. There is actually a lot of positive social interaction between generations. The appearance of mutual derision is largely for the benefit of casual onlookers. The truth is that teenagers and their parents are actually the same people. Teenagers are cursed with a virtual cocktail of sex hormones sloshing around in their systems, which generally causes them to run amok and create problems, sometimes in the form of offspring. Thus . . . Parents.
Forgive me for stating something this obvious, but sometimes the whole ‘circle of life’ thing is easy to lose sight of in the face of all that angst and tension.
So why all the tension? Right? Because duh. Parents look at their kids and see themselves 20 years ago. Kids look at their parents and see themselves in 20 years. In either case, they dislike what they see, and wish to correct it.
That’s right. Not only are Parents and Teenagers the same people, but they also have exactly the same objectives. Parents reason that if they can exert enough control over their errant hoodlums, they might be able to save them from their fate. Kids reason that if they do enough insane, illogical shit before they hit 30, they might be able to somehow avoid their destiny. Both attempts fail miserably, as God intended, and the human race continues.
That’s the big picture though, and there’s obviously no changing it. The hamsters eat. The hamsters sleep. The hamsters run on the little hamster wheel. The hamsters have wild hamster sex with each other. The hamsters have hamster babies. The hamsters bob up and down and sing a sped up version of “Whistle Stop” by Roger Miller, copied illegally off of a VHS tape of Walt Disney’s “Robin Hood.” The hamsters briefly achieve Internet fame. The hamsters are shut down for copyright infringement. The hamsters die.
Hamsterqaatsi
So in the light of this, why doesn’t everyone just chill out and accept their grim fate of perpetuating the species?
Mostly because, regardless of good intentions, there are a few other elements of the generational gap that render communication a little bit difficult.
Take Facebook for instance. It was once a semi-exclusive website, which used truly admirable amounts of misdirection and class to create a place online where college students could try to hook up, without looking like jackasses. A few years ago, this convenient function of the website was dramatically reduced when Facebook was opened to the general public – and everyone’s mom joined.
Don’t get me wrong – I like mothers. Who the hell doesn’t? I’m a mother lover. Plus it’s totally hilarious when your roommate asks you “Dude, who are you chatting with?” and you reply “Your Mom.” And it’s actually true.
This aside though, the direct and frequent interaction of disparate generations via this online medium has thrown into contrast a lot of glaringly obvious examples of incompatibility. Even though parents and children might have the same motives, objectives, etc., they sure as hell don’t share the same personal taste in just about anything. Despite your parents’ protests, this has nothing to do with keeping up with culture. College kids in 1985 were just as cool if not way cooler than kids in 2011, and honestly, we still listen to all of the same music. Nope, this is a deeper issue, one which I would primarily attribute to the older generation being subjected to extended amounts of oppression by “The Man”, and subsequently abandoning all of their personal aspirations, which they will now attempt to live out by proxy through you. This is a little confusing, since the new generation of cock-happy gunslingers is just as unlikely to succeed as any previous one, but the idea is probably still attractive enough to be persistent.
All of this has, of course, been examined before by far wiser people than myself, and I doubt any of the conclusions I have come to in this post are in any way revolutionary or clever. Therefore, If my musings are to be in any way valuable to the reader, I really ought to provide some kind of final personal insight into the GRAND SOLUTION.
That’s a little above my pay-grade, obviously. But I will give it a stab.
First of all, the façade of moral superiority on both sides really has to come down. Our parents are not idiots. Disillusioned, burnt-out shells of human beings – yes – but certainly not idiots. They fail to identify with pop culture, not because they lack the capacity to understand it, but because they really don’t give a flying fuck who Justin Bieber is, or whether or not he’s the antichrist. Your parents care very deeply about their children, however. So next time your mom buys tickets to go see Lady Gaga with you – or something weird like that – it might be wise to consider the underlying fact that she is trying to connect with you, not your stupid subculture.
Also, children are not idiots. Granted, this may be difficult to swallow at first. Children do a lot of stupid things, as in, a lot of stupid things. This is because younger people generally place a lower value on stuff like reputation, stability and staying out of jail. In the eyes of the average college student, the future holds nothing but misery, reputation is over rated, and life is essentially a bizarre and somewhat hilarious experiment. Depressingly enough, the explanation for this also comes back to the reproductive cycle. Most of us are not married and don’t have kids, which allows for an unprecedented degree of judicial and executive flexibility. Put simply, young people tend to think that they have nothing to lose, mostly because they don’t. Things like money, stability and status have only ever really mattered to anyone in the context of protecting and providing for a family. Short of that, people are prone to trying out all kinds of crazy shit.
Take Christianity for instance. The crippling responsibility associated with “settling down” is a large part of the impetus behind various controversial passages in 1st Corinthians regarding marriage. Paul believed that by making the commitment to marry and produce offspring, his followers were limiting their effectiveness as free-roaming proselytes. This opinion generally makes sense when you consider that most early Christians were sold on the concept of an imminent apocalypse (28 Days Later, “The end is extremely fucking nigh.” type stuff), but for obvious reasons it doesn’t sit quite as well with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republican crowd, a demographic whose wild success can be largely attributed to it’s capacity for long-term planning. We have all heard a lot of young, fired-up pastors ranting about their hatred for “Luke-warm Christianity” and exhorting people to go on missions. Without going off on a tangent about the logical shortcomings of the recent evangelical movement, I will at least point out that these people are – by and large – morons who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. Ask the average missionary. They will probably concur with my assessment, albeit using different nomenclature.
My point here is that the family structure, along with all of its baggage, is an integral part of any society. Spouses and children are not luggage, and by entering into a covenant of marriage, a person is by definition limiting a lot of their future actions. This is a good and necessary thing, because otherwise we would have even more shitty relationships and emotionally fucked-up kids than we already do.
Likewise, the health of any society also depends on it maintaining a certain number of young, irresponsible people who are willing to take risks. Without starving artists and inventors to keep shit interesting, we would still be in the Dark Ages. We are irreversibly in debt to no-account drifters like Michelangelo, Thomas Paine, Nikola Tesla and Jesus Christ. ‘nuff said.
At any rate, my dear friends, I hope that these ramblings have given you some food for thought, or at least some amusement. I must scamper off to class now.
Peace.
Robert
