Sev made a comment over at his site that I can live with:
I think we need to start putting that front and center in all our writings, everywhere, like a modern day Carthago delenda est:We’re not for sale.
We won’t eat the bugs. We won’t live in the pod. We won’t say we love Big Brother, not at any price. We’re not for sale, because fuck you, that’s why. If I have to give up tv and internet and my cell phone and even books and the occasional glass of wine and almost anything else rather than eat the bugs, then so be it, because fuck you, that’s why.
Yep, that’s it right there. It mostly sums up my entire life from the teenage years on to now. There was an awful band back in the 90s called Rage Against the Machine. But they had one absolutely monster track and you know the one I’m talking about. If there was an anthem for Gen X it was that right there.
Bad Cattitude has a nice piece today, although it went on for a bit too long, (I kind of drifted off towards the end of it). It’s about how kids growing up in the 70s and 80s were left to fend for themselves and that such an upbringing meant that when we got to adulthood we mostly didn’t need to rely on authority figures to make the decisions for us.
But the kids today grew up with the helicopter parents and they don’t have the skills to resolve conflict. They can’t govern themselves so they need external forces to do it for them; to keep them safe. Stay safe, stay safe. Every time I hear some twit utter that absurdity a little kitten dies somewhere, (sorry, not sorry).
It was the Boomer parents that started this off, of course. But the Gen X parents sure continued it. Why did that happen then? Why did the kids who grew up with near total freedom to play then go and impose such awful restrictive worlds on their own progeny?
I think the pressures of conforming to the ideas of the day are so great that only the most resolute can withstand it. And because the chicks are so susceptible to such social conformity, and because we haven’t had the chicks under control for so long, then almost every man in his individual home has been brow beaten down into picking the kids up from school every damn day, even though he himself had walked home after catching two different buses at the age of seven.
Yes, there are some of us who live like Sev describes. We won’t eat the bugs and we won’t live in the pods. But most of the other poor saps will, just so they can retain the vague and uneasy hope of finally getting a sad blow job from their frigid wife on their birthday. Most guys might think ‘fuck you’ but they can’t say it. They made too many bad choices and now they’re in too deep.
He’s for sale because he sold out his entire life. He’ll eat the bugs and he’ll live in the pod. We know he will because he already has. And the years fly by real quick. His only hope is that his pig of a wife divorces him and takes him for every cent he doesn’t have.
The powers that be are dealing with that guy, not guys who have spent most of their adult lives saying, fuck you. Because that guy, in many different guises, is the majority. That’s all they need and they have them already. We know they have them because look at what happened over the past two years.
So, yeah: we’re not for sale. But in the end it doesn’t matter because they don’t want to buy us. They just want to make sure that we don’t get to influence the guys they have bought.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here,