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| I was just in Londis, queuing up to buy my sugar, and the guy in front of me was chatting to the girl behind the checkout as she was scanning his shopping. I found myself angry, snapping inside my head that we didn't all have all day to stand around and chat so shut up and get a move on. I then realised what an horrendous thing that was to think. I mean, here were two people, chatting, interacting as human beings, and I was getting angry at them for doing that? That’s absolutely horrible. Something else about myself that I’ve got to change. Anyway, baby boomers have been in the news again recently, as Mister Clinton turns sixty. And, we are, of course, getting the usual tired old crap trotted out by those proud to be part of the post-war generation: we broke down barriers; we invented feminism; we liberated the gays and the blacks; we invented pop music; we invented television as entertainment and a view on to the world; blah blah blah blah. All true, of course, but only from a certain point of view. You see, I feel that it’s not unfair to judge a generation by the society and by the generation they leave behind. The legacy of the baby boomers? Reality T.V., the war on terror (I’m not going to give it the decency of capital letters), consumer-centric culture, call centres, benefit culture, unparalleled amounts of consumer debt . . . I mean, this is the generation that demanded everything right here and right now, and now leaves their parents slowly dying in nursing homes because they can’t be bothered to look after them. The live out in comfortable suburbs and drive to work in their executive cars while chowing down on factory farm meat laced with preservatives because they want the food they want when they want as cheap as possible because they deserve it, so screw everyone else and give me a cheap sandwich I can leave in my glove-box for two days before I eat it. They’re so proud their children had the chance to go to university but have ensured the only thing that university education will get their children is tens of thousands of pounds of debt. And their children end up just being faceless peons in faceless companies who don’t do anything and don’t mean anything, easily replaced cogs in a machine that turns for the sake of turning, so they have to go out every night and get pissed to escape their lives for a few brief hours. And then they have children of their own, and the selfishness and ignorance is magnified with each generation. And we end up with Scallies, and people who storm around shops demanding everything and demanding it now, demanding the whole world revolves around them and getting pissed of when it doesn’t. People who treat those in the service industry like their personal slaves, faceless and thoughtless avatars of a company which exists purely for their own benefit. We get people who are incapable of any empathy with another member of the human race, who don’t understand what it means when someone else cries and who don’t want to be bothered with anything which may tie up their time for five minutes and doesn’t give them any immediate benefit. We get generations who don’t understand art and music and are only happy when someone is feeding them cotton wool and minipop. Anything else scares them and they burn it. I mean, the baby boomers did break down a lot of barriers. They just then realised they needed real jobs, and started selling everything to every one. Their ideal of freedom turned into selfishness, this idea that whoever I am, and where ever I am, I want what I want and I want it now. And if I don’t get it, I’ve got the right to lose my temper and feel aggrieved, because you owe it to me. The environment is in a death spiral because it’s better for business if we all keep using fossil fuels and so no one is giving us an alternative, and the baby boomer’s children are up in arms because wind farms spoil their view. ?!?!?!?! I’m sorry? How can you make people like that realise that, without the wind farms, YOU WON’T HAVE ANY FUCKING VIEW, BECAUSE WE’LL ALL BE DEAD! No oil means no power and no industry and no electricity, and if you had to go out and find your own food and make your own heat and light, tell me, just how fucking long do you think you’re going to last? And our roads are choking with cars because people don’t want to live in the dirty city centres, they want to live in the nice suburbs. But still work at HSBC and shop at Tesco. And that means that all the big shops have moved out of town and so we all need to have cars, because pubic transport is shit. I’d love to use it, but when I can get to Bangor in fifteen minutes in my car and it takes over an hour on the bus and costs £1.50 each way, how can I? And I love trains. Trains are great. I love riding on trains, so long as they’re not too busy. I’d take a train over any other form of transport any day. But they’re dirty and unreliable. Any luggage I bring with me in a hindrance and other passengers hate me for it. And if someone else is coming with me, the price instantly doubles. I mean, no, it’s not really that much more expensive for me to go back to Kirkstone one the train, but if Gemma comes too, then it becomes over twice the price. And I’m at the mercy of the trains. I get left on cold, wind-swept platforms for half an hour, an hour, waiting for my connection, too scared to wait anywhere else in case I miss it. The baby boomers ultimate legacy is people like me: people twisted with modern guilt but without the power to do anything about it; people scraping a living, suffocating under an impossibly high mountain of debt with anything above an hundred pounds or so out our reach and any form of credit unthinkable; a history of depression and self-abuse, because that’s the only way we know to deal with things; people married to their car, despite their income and real need for it . . . People, in short, who’ve been given the opportunity to be shat on by any one, of any sex, colour, orientation or religion, and who spend their lives at the bottom of increasingly vast barrels of shit. We have no power in our lives and instead are intravenously fed the false power that adverts spew at us, the power to, ‘have it our way’ at anyone else’s expense, and as we become more and more powerless, the tighter and tighter we cling onto this false power and the more and more we abuse the fellow human beings around us. I am a long, long way from perfect. It’s my life, it’s my choice, and at the end of the day, I’m the one responsible for my actions. But I’m fighting against what society is trying to make me and has been trying to force me to be all my life. And it’s hard, and no one ever says, ‘well done’, or, ‘you’re doing the right thing’. People just sneer at me and mutter to their friends about me, and hurl abuse at me, and tell me to stop being so stupid. Anyway. That was my rant. |
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