Why Millenials are Whiny Social Justice Warriors and How Pop Culture is the Song of our Depression

[content warning: references suicide, sexual assault, family violence, and mid-2000s pop rock WHICH WAS AWESOME UNLIKE THOSE OTHER THINGS] Before I begin I should be clear that I am a whiny social justice warrior. I, in fact, consider “whining” to be one of the key first steps to change. It is, of course, not the only step to change, but if we don’t communicate clearly that something is wrong, we won’t get it fixed.

This essay is about why depression has become the language of a generation. The problem is, as it has always been, that some people’s whines get listened to more than others.

In the midst of a manufactured public panic about an “opiate epidemic” (when far more lethal painkillers, like ibuprofen, are in basically everything and the mere mention of which was recently discovered to be a reliable predictor of a suicide attempt). Doctors don’t take women’s pain as seriously, and we come up with ways to blame protesters for the problems being addressed by participants in Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock demonstrations for the desperate positions they find themselves in. And the very subject I’m here to write about exemplifies this problem: who you are, what you are associated with, how you communicate — all these things determine, far more than how serious your problems are, whether your story will resonate with the public, whether that story is on a silver screen or told desperately in a series of tweets begging for help.

So, I’m not that old. I am 11 months and three days short of three decades of age. That means that I celebrated my first birthday when George H.W. Bush replaced Ronald Reagan in the office of the Presidency, and my twenty-ninth when Donald J. Trump replaced Barack Obama. So I don’t have massive historical perspective on protest. Most of what I do know about protest comes through popular culture renditions of it. I know that racial civil rights was advanced — not “accomplished”, as we’re so often falsely taught in schools — by the consistent protest of both violent and nonviolent activists, and that radical feminism and liberal feminism together helped to bring about Roe vs. Wade, Title IX, and equal employment laws (which still do not address the wage gap). I know that as I was learning to read, ACT OUT followed in the legacy of the Stonewall Protests in forcing the Federal Government to address the AIDS crisis. All of these different groups were “whining.” Some did it with a brick through a window, and others did it through court filings.

And then the whining seemed to stop. Right when I was first politically aware — probably earlier than most 29-year-olds; I remember reading the Christian Science Monitor in 1994, when I was six — it seemed as if, in Fukuyama’s words, we were at an “end to history.” Republicans and Democrats battled over The Budget and The National Debt. Global Warming was this nebulous thing that I was pretty sure was real because my parents were liberal, but no one knew for sure. There was the wage pay gap and there were atrocities “abroad” — of course, being a privileged young American, that didn’t seem to count — but things seemed stable. The President was impeached for sexual misconduct which, I will take an aside to note, I believe probably was a significant violation of sexual consent and probably should have been investigated. Then, we had a Presidential election, and a Republican won. I didn’t remember what it was like under a Republican, having started reading the news two years after Bush the Elder’s exit from the Presidency, but I was more curious than anything. I was twelve — thirteen the day Bush Jr. was sworn in — and while my own mental health tormented me, I wasn’t worried about politics.

Then, some guys blew up two skyscrapers and part of the Pentagon, and in the words of the narrator of Avatar: the Last Airbender, “everything changed.”

Suddenly, people were scared. People were angry. If this wasn’t an issue that left and right alike generally agreed was awful, someone would have called the reaction whining. Instead, we called it war. Like most Americans, I followed my parents in believing that retaliation in a warlike manner was justified; I then, in an act of teenage rebellion, declared myself a Republican and supported the War in Iraq, when they did not, out of a vastly misguided “liberal” (in the sense that gets used as a pejorative by leftists on Twitter these days) concern for “women’s rights in the Middle East.” Then, I experienced a minor violation of civil liberties while, ironically, touring the nation’s capital out of patriotism, and suddenly, I was against Bush, against torture, against war.

By the time I was in college, everyone hated Bush that I knew. We were all certain the next President would be a Democrat; we were all sure that things would get better and the wars would end and we’d be back to the End of History that we were born into. Obama was elected, and the ACA passed, and it seemed like we were back on track. I worked to help elect Obama, and I never had any real doubt that he’d win.

During the period of Obama’s Presidency, I myself earned a PhD in Communication, which led me to read political theory — especially the actual tenets of Marxism — and learn that the political status quo upon which our society was built was still massively part of exploitation. The metaphor of The Matrix, always one of my favorite films even before I came out as transgender and realized the extent to which it was a transgender allegory, convinced me that while I wasn’t going to be praising Lenin and Stalin any time soon, there were problems in our world that couldn’t be solved by voting for Democrats.

Then the stock market crashed. Then the Tea Party happened, and Occupy, and GamerGate, and bathroom bills and Chelsea Manning’s torture at the hands of the administration I helped put into power.

Somewhere in all of this, I still held on to the feeling that I was safe, but I know that wasn’t how the slightly younger members of the Millenial generation, those who remember Bush II the way I remember Clinton, felt. I remembered a time when we were not in a meaningful sense “at war” — even though I now recognize we were complicit in atrocities during those times. My slightly younger near-peers did not.

And then everything changed again. Somehow, a real estate mogul whose grandfather inspired Scrooge McDuck became President of the United States, less than a month ago, on my twenty-ninth birthday, and now I am afraid. Already he has torn back protections for me as a transgender American. The quality of health care for all of us is in peril. Even those in much older generations are threatened by impending cuts to services.

No one seemed to expect it — it was like another 9/11. I suspect that it has taken as many lives as 9/11, via its impact on mental health, already.

This didn’t start with Trump. Like I said, people in their late teens to mid twenties have always had this feeling that they’re living in a doomed world. The language of our popular culture is depression. Harry Potter, the fantasy franchise of my childhood, and the original Star Wars, the fantasy franchise of my eight-years-senior brother’s, depicted fights against fascism, yes, but in the guise of empowerment, of coming of age. Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter face torture, violence, oppression, and the loss of loved ones, and walk out stronger — and their nations, their worlds, are stronger, by implication, at the end of their respective stories.

Both these stories just got sequels. Both show the marks of the current teen and twenty-somethings’ fantasy universes — Hunger Games and Divergent. They are dystopias. This differs from the previous iterations of the franchises. Star Wars was a Western, where an evil Empire reigned, and we saw its rise and its fall (the rise being told in my teen years). But the status quo was freedom. The Empire was unstable, a product of corruption and darkness. There would always be a Return of the Jedi. In Harry Potter, originally, Voldemort was literally a neo-Nazi, replacing a literal Wizard Hitler and rising to power. He was an aberration defeated by the power of a mother and father’s love for their children.

Now, a decade after the last entry in each franchise, we have new stories — The Force Awakens and The Cursed Child — which tell us what happens next. They form the core of a worldview that can only be formed by a generation who never believed they were at the end of history. The Force Awakens literally begins with a young woman scavenging for scraps in the wreckage of the Empire — like so many young people today working minimum wage jobs, desperate for benefits, barely able to survive. Luke Skywalker was always going to eventually leave Tattooine and become more than a dirt farmer, and let’s be honest, his life on Tattooine was boring but Owen and Beru loved him and he had a mentor in Ben Kenobi and friends and things were pretty decent. Rey is alone, truly alone — and her closest companion, Finn, has been forced into fascism. His rejection of it is the only thing that drags Rey on her adventure, away from picking through scraps of the old Empire and into fighting the new one.

In The Cursed Child, Harry Potter fails at the promise he makes to his son, Albus Severus, at the end of the final novel: he cannot love his son, not truly, if he is a Slytherin. There are strong hints toward Harry’s son’s homosexuality, continuing Rowling’s bizarre coyness about dealing with gay characters given that if she wanted to she could get away with writing Fifty Shades type fiction set in the Potterverse and people would devour it. But in any case, The Cursed Child is the story of how Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy, both cursed with fathers who don’t know how to love, in a world which is a frozen status quo, threaten to restore the old order of history, because their fathers cannot do what their grandparents did for their fathers: love them unconditionally.

I’ve picked these two franchises because they describe the malaise that we all live in now. I’m, somehow, miraculously, tenuously, employed at a job that almost pays my bills (and yet, like so many of my generation, find myself periodically begging for help through crowdfunding just to get to the next week, and speaking of which, I could use some help this week. We’re scavengers, like Rey, and castoff queers like Albus and Scorpius, in a world our parents thought they saved but which maybe can’t be saved at all. J.J. Abrams stated that the First Order, the villains of the new Star Wars trilogy, are inspired by the conspiracy theory that a group of Nazis escaped to Argentina, and indeed, they look just like the Empire, and have the same predilection for building giant guns with trenches carved into them and triangle-shaped capital ships. The ultimate mastermind of Cursed Child’s near-tragedy, besides the failure of Harry and Draco as parents, is the daughter of Voldemort herself. In both cases, the message resonates all the way back through the history classes we all were taught, the America-centric heroic narratives of progress: Hitler isn’t dead, the Nazis aren’t gone. The evils of the past remain, and they’re alive in our world, today. And we are living in the wreckage of that evil. What once looked like a world of inevitable progress now, like Rey’s home of Jaaku, looks like a poisoned wasteland which inevitably promises nothing but lonely isolation and low wages. Hogwarts is no longer a wonderful escape from the horrors of aberrant abuse, but an extension of that abuse itself.

So why are Millenials whiny social justice warriors? Because all life is are stories, and the fictional ones happen because of the real ones. Occupy Wall Street collapsed when its social media manager got a better job at one of the horrible capitalist companies she protested. Obama continued to commit Bush II’s war crimes, handed over the reigns to a reality star rapist, and went surfing. No real “economic” recovery has occurred, in America or elsewhere. Our world is Jaaku, it’s Cursed Child era Hogwarts. It’s the Hunger Games, where we’re forced to fight each other in the arena of “the job market” for the amusement of our managers, and left traumatized by what we suffer there.

Of course, People of Color, disabled people, and others who have never had privilege will look at this and say, “well, that’s obvious.” But to young American white kids raised with privilege, we got told stories that said things could be bad, but they’d get better. That continued, until finally even the architects of our popular culture, the billionaires who put together Harry Potter and Star Wars, realized that the only way to tell a story that would draw in audiences was to tell it in a wasteland of fascism and poverty.