Millennials Repulsed by Boomers’ Coca-Cola Patriotism
Let’s say an entire city is struck by an attack.
How does a heroic nation respond in such a crisis?
What does a heroic citizen demand from their government in that moment?
Because we are having this moment. It’s happening right now.
What are you doing?
What are you thinking?
Or are you a shithead Boomer asking, “Who is going to pay for this? It better not make my taxes go up.”
As a civility, we have been sedentary. And little wonder. The example the Boomers set for us has been miserable. Faced with unprecedented prosperity following the War, the Boomers demanded private wealth at the expense of crippling public enterprise.
Boomers said greed must be good, and it reflected in their policy choices. Lowering taxes for the wealthy was the number one domestic priority of the Reagan administration, followed by the wholesale deregulation of the finance industry. Behind closed doors, Congress promised campaign backers they’d deregulate anything else standing in the way of profit.
Under Reagan, every public enterprise that wasn’t responsible for world slaughter would be subjected to budget cuts. Bureaucrats would employ a soulless cost-benefit analysis that virtually always under-accounted for human suffering. Any cost that could be borne by the poor ultimately was.
Under Boomers, government expenditure became less about self-investment than outsourcing, consulting and subcontracting, the shoveling of federal tax dollars into for-profit furnaces.
Obviously, the ramifications of the Boomer fire sale have been egregious. Politicians broker between constituents and campaign financiers at the expense of democracy. Congress is bought. Lobbyism is political cancer. And our commercial media is quite literally corporate propaganda.
Our public imagination has atrophied. Millions now believe a class of animals who are quite literally in the pay of the enemy when they say there is nothing America can do to stop the enemy.
But only candidates take lobbyist money, not us. America can enshrine healthcare as a human right whenever it damn well wants. Only Clinton is paid to say we can’t. But her limits are not our limits. Her obvious constraints are not democracy’s.
A lot of candidates seem to be in the practice of telling Americans no. No, we can’t have universal healthcare. No, we can’t raise the minimum wage to $15. No, we can’t stop the military-industrial complex. No, we can’t fund education. No, we can’t fix the roads.
No, we can’t invest in our future now, who will pay for it?
Who will pay for it?
Always the stupidest question asked by the same people. The Boomers bit down on the austerity bullshit the hardest. That’s why it’s always a stupid Boomer who throws himself onto the coffers of the rich, squealing that capital gains taxes are tantamount to treason.
And so instead of investing in ourselves, the Boomers will leave us with this batshit legacy:
In pursuing policies that would let greed dictate America, the Boomers have allowed a corrupted finance regime to flourish while American cities fall like dominoes to three decades of civic anorexia.
Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, Flint, America’s poor black cities are all one hurricane, one cracked pipeline, one pension scandal away from implosion.
Municipal infrastructure in America has been criminally starved, erased from the ledger of public concern.
Our infrastructure is so bad, we literally give ourselves a fucking D+ in civil engineering.
What more evidence could I give to demonstrate how much we suck as a nation.
I mean, look at this:
We’re on no honor roll for statecraft. Our best grade is a B- in SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT.
But there are Americans who insist we are somehow still, despite all evidence to the contrary, the greatest nation in the world.
You know who still says this? Boomers, weened during the 80’s and 90’s on a steady diet of Coca-Cola patriotism. Boomers who take credit for the collapse of the USSR as if it were a war they actually fought in by going to the fucking mall every weekend.
You know why they can sustain this delusion? Because when Boomers were our age, they looked out on a world rife with poverty, species die-off, human trafficking, violence and pandemic and LITERALLY SAID SHIT LIKE “GREED IS GOOD.”
And that’s why Donald Trump is running an 80’s Night campaign platform. He’s trying to give Boomers one last dance.
Millennials are a lot of different things, but where I think a lot of us converge is in our collective resentment of having to inherit this crumbling infrastructure. Its bones are so weak from decades of emaciation, our cities now fall like dominoes to Boomer-made catastrophes that tragically out-scale anything ISIS could do to us.
And we know why things got this way. We know whose fault it is.
But we’re the ones who will have to find a way to pay for it.
“For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and slow decay.”
— Bobby Kennedy
