Inspiration Here
I don’t think we dwell enough on implications and consequences. I think the people that do write things like John Cheese and try to wake the rest of the world up to the often not pretty underlying reality going on beyond your fears and ego are vitally important. At the risk of sounding impossibly ironic, I think the current zeitgeist, not just with my generation, giving or taking a few years, is one of entitled self-important bullshit. Peoples’ attitudes anymore don’t simply disgust me, they frighten me. Any sort of explanation that comes in to make sense of why I feel this way I think deserves a pause to take note.
I hear the words oblivious and ignorant tossed around frequently. I use them a fair share myself. Given that we live in a technology and information driven age, it’s fair to assume that by the day we are growing more and more ignorant of the growing number of things that are shaping our world. The one’s currently investigating are swallowed up in the infinite amount of amateur bloggers and loosely defined “journalists.” The ones who’ve had a chance to look back at how things used to operate are pressured to acclimate or become irrelevant. This new hybrid cultivation I can barely bring myself to use the word “culture” to describe seems fundamentally unstable or at least eerily flawed.
What do I mean? John speaks to it in the article. Human interaction, learning from mistakes, and being brought to your knees by a lot of crippling facts about reality. An entire generation, let alone an overall culture that espouses doing the opposite of these things, is going to have potentially very dangerous consequences. People did use to have to work constantly at dangerous or mundane jobs to ensure the very survival of their family. Now, we treat moving back home or working a minimum wage job as if we were slaves. [More accurate would be indentured servant, but still too heavily connotative :P]
Oh, you have to track your shipment to some unknown location in the mall? Your life is super stressful. You mean you spend a full 4 minutes! Trying to teach an Asian kid how to say “pretzel-dog” instead of hamburger? I wouldn’t trade for that if there were a gun to my head. Never mind the inescapable background noise of high school politics and gossip, that’s a given, but it’s truly a wonder how you survive sometimes under such harsh conditions. You might be quick to point out this is just informal conversation, people are really thinking all sorts of things that just aren’t polite. Short answer; they aren’t.
But that speaks more to the older 20’s and 30’s crowd. The worst are the kids my age or younger. They’re informed by the ones who aspired to be “slackers” or anti-establishment. They are mommy’s credit card holder and “only” spent $150 dollars on a pair of jeans and wrist scrunchies. I frankly dread when they come up to the kiosk because I don’t know any words that can beat pretentious, entitled, oblivious, etc. Maybe it isn’t a surprise they’ve developed this “old world money” attitude. They have been given everything and more their whole lives.
I’m most troubled by the culture of ignorance; one that fears even allowing for the words fear, wrong, or mistake. The one where 13 year olds post statuses about their failing love life culminating to a drunk send-off before they kill themselves. How man missed or failed conversations had to go on between him and his parents or friends in order for something like that to even be conceivable? It’s probably safe to say that neither he, nor his parents nor friends even have a conception of love that makes sense. They’ve never been given or shown an example of a relationship that doesn’t end in some movie-clichéd calamity. It can become the norm to freak the fuck out at every scary thing you’ve never been taught to deal with.
Everything has implications, and anything implies everything. If you download a game, you can download any game, every game. If you learn how to make an excuse, you can make any excuse, every excuse. If you don’t learn or forget something, you can forget or not learn anything and everything. And as much as I hate all-inclusive dramatic language, I don’t think it’s a secret why history repeats itself. I think when you look, it’s not hard to see into what people do when they are afraid, or dumb, or ignorant, and the differences therein.
All I’m saying is I’m going to clean up when all those young whipper-snappers lose all knowledge of how to flirt, treat anything as more important than themselves, and put all of their emotional value and self-worth into something so easily disrupted by a well-placed EMP.
