Fall 2018
Freedom’s Not Just Another Word
Until fairly recently, I was largely unaware of the animus of non-Baby Boomers toward the Spoiled Brat portion of the Baby Boomers of America. We non-Baby Boomers now outnumber them, and so we ought to take heart, or some form of courage, in strength in numbers.
“Strength in numbers” is a concept alien to many of us non-Baby Boomers because we tend toward independent thought. As rugged individualists, we non-Boomers have been almost reflexively aghast at the herd mentality of this group that has been gauged as having been born between 1946 and 1964. I strongly object to this bracketing because I’ve known, and loved, parents — and their children — who were born within those bookends.
No, being a Boomer is more a state of mind: a narcissistic, hedonistic, spoiled brat, brazenly hypocritical way of looking at the world. It is an attitude that ticks off just about every person who has had to come into contact with the puffed-up egos and the endless neuroses of the Brat Baby Boomer.
I choose to re-name this unfortunate sector of the generational pie “Unintended Consequences” because, surely, no parents intended such vile hedonism upon the face of the planet. Or did they?
I wonder . . .
Did the parents who had fought to save the world from Hitler and Hirohito and, to a lesser extent, Mussolini, ever really contemplate the baneful effects of their self-indulgence of these brats of the post-World War II blob (there are segments of it worldwide, especially in Western Europe, site of rampant, rotting socialism)?
Did those brave souls understand that the freedoms they’d just sacrificed to ensure for future generations would be imperiled by the anti-social ranting and mercenary schemes of their offspring?
I knew Brat Boomers, all too well. They believed they’d be forever young, even though they did not ever grow up. They were friends, up to a point. You couldn’t really expect a Brat Boomer to be a true-blue friend. He wouldn’t be true, although he was always blue.
You couldn’t really count on a Brat Boomer for long, because any scintilla of neediness was sensed as a trap, and she fled the sight of anyone who wished to engage in a give-and-take of emotional inter-dependence.
Brat Boomers mistook “independence” as not needing anyone: You do your thing; I’ll do mine. No ties, no strings.
With this vacuous mind-set, they got all strung out and tied up with their fears and false beliefs. For the Brat Boomers, freedom really wasn’t just another word. Freedom was yet another demand, like love and peace, to be filled by other people. They craved freedom from so many things that they ended up with nothing.
“Why do you have to be so heavy?” one Brat Boomer-friend asked me.
“Why do you have to be so light?” was my reply.
And now we post-Baby-Boomers must work to counter-act and counter-effect the intended consequences of the Unintended Consequences. It’s quite an irony! Our work is a hefty re-construction project, the piecing-together of a once-stable society that these spoiled brats despised from, let us say, kindergarten.
The job is lengthy, and it will require patience and time; but it is a labor of love. The labor for us is aided by new machines, new modes of thinking, new means of looking at the future, new visions of a future.
Perhaps the purpose of these Unintended Consequences was precisely this dismal design: to create a near-collapse of all that previous and future generations could hold near and dear —
stability and permanence, known as the Establishment; love, true love, not the psychedelic fraudulent frenzy demanded as a Constitutional right; the routine of life, a schedule that caressed the day-to-day essence of living; tradition, the cherished chimes of convention handed down the centuries from family to family; real music and art, creative works that aspire to the Heavens; aesthetics that are aesthetic; cars that look like cars; marriages that involve love and fidelity; children who honor their parents and feel trust in adults, in their nation, in God . . .
Our reclamation of those precious intangibles is the noble mission that comes in the aftermath of a horrible interval in the United States of America. The deliverance of this nation from the misdeeds and malefaction of the Brat Boomers forms redemption, not for them, but for the patriots of this great land.
I’ve researched previous generations of America as part of my work as a novelist. Only the post-Civil War generation garnered so much revulsion, mainly because of the Southern males who were spoiled and pampered to the point of reckless irresponsibility. Many of those men had grown up father-less due to the War Between the States. The nihilistic Boomers are nonetheless the most despised in the history of this nation. It’s a heavy burden they will undoubtedly refuse to bear.
I’d like to believe there was a beneficent objective for all of that garbage that the Brat Boomers revered. I’d like to accept this truth: millions of lives were born for a reason, though that reason is not yet fully clear to those of us who must navigate in the wake of their personal decay and societal destruction.
Their pernicious, petulant, willfully wasted lives skewed so much in terms of data and data sets and definitions, history, marketing, the views of America, the entire concept of “normalcy”, the crooked path that this nation had to take simply because of their sheer numbers. They became, fundamentally, the generational blob that had to move through the snake that once warned:
DON’T TREAD ON ME.
It is a mournful epitaph, these momentous moments in America that are putting to rest the consequences of the crass cycle of their lives, those sad, dissipated decades that wafted on drugs and blatant disrespect for all that Americans of the here-and-now hold sacred. They are not of the here-and-now. They are of yesterday, a yesterday that never truly was, except in their own warped minds. Their legacy consists of corruption, cynicism and crippling debt, financially, morally and emotionally. It is time to toss that legacy away!
Because those Brat Boomers would not grant to anyone the decency or dignity of life, life vanquished them. Instant karma took a while to get them, or get to them. Their sheer numbers are no more. And with that thought, there is hope for the best in our beloved country.
The best is yet to be, simply because of the Americans with a love of liberty, a heart-rending awareness that freedom is not free. Our codicil of so much wretched wreckage is an oath, a pledge to love, honor and defend America, as never before.
For those swollen-headed revisionists of history, I have news:
“Freedom’s just another word” has been re-written:
Freedom is the dearest word.
