Fight Club was a movie entirely centered around this problem. The ‘younger’ Generation X, those about 39 years old and younger, are not needed by anyone; no one looks up to any of us, nobody needs us or gives us any real love. Nobody even wants us around.
We take up too much space. We use too much air. We make too much trash, we eat too much food, we want too much attention. We make too much pollution. We are overcrowding the earth with too many unwanted people. All of these paranoias — most of which are actually scientifically not true — are just a symptom of the real problem: Them.
But who is ‘Them’?
My generation uses that word, capitalized, as if describing the very devil. We whisper it, we put emphasis on it: “THEM”. My parents used to ask me: who are ‘they’?
‘They’ are the elder generation, the group that includes every mature adult above us who should have wanted us, should have needed us, should have brought us into the world with delight and done everything in their power to create for us a life, and then live that life alongside us. ‘They’ are the larger archetype of our parents and grandparents and village elders, the ones who should have been the most supportive, the most delighted in us, but were in fact the most remote. ‘They’ are the elder generations who control every institute of man under which we are oppressed.
‘They’ are the betrayers of Man.
The world is too small for the selfish as long as anyone else exists in it. Our parents were often less than thrilled that we were born. How many of our parents actually sat down and planned their first pregnancy, then got pregnant on purpose? They were a child of the 60’s and 70’s when everyone just wanted to have sex… but no one wanted the children that came about because of it.
Every child born today is a survivor of a war that is destroying 1.37 million lives a year just in America (that is about 1 billion human beings in total, the total worldwide sum to date); every person of the X generation knows deep to their core that they could have been aborted. Instead, they were allowed to live; but there is a big difference between being allowed to live, and being wanted.
After that, your parents got bored of each other and divorced, and then you got tossed from one to the other like a hot potato, neither really wanting to keep you. Either that, or you got abandoned by one and dealt with by the other who is then reminded of the man she hates or the woman who left him every time that parent looked at you. Nobody wanted you. You were a mistake.
You went to Kindergarten. In school, you learned that the teacher — who had far too many kids crammed into his or her class and wasn’t being paid half of what they should have been — didn’t really want you to be there either. If the teacher had less students, they would have been a lot happier. You were surplus. Your school was not given enough money by the government (because the government officials embezzle 70% of all the finances that were supposed to go to the schools) to even feed you decent meals; you ate dog-food for lunch and you were told it was a four-square balanced diet.
You tried to find a mentor among your relatives and the friends of your parents, but learned pretty fast after a few painful experiences that they only wanted you around kind of like their pet dog: to amuse them. After they made you light the firecrackers because you didn’t know better, and you got your fingers and eyebrows burnt, or after your uncle got you drunk just to laugh as you stumbled around the room, you figured out that a mentor was never going to come into your life. Everyone is just out for themselves. It was kind of heartbreaking, but you moved on your lonely way.
For a while maybe you found acceptance among some peer-group, going to crazy lengths to be one of them, desperate because you had no other family and no one else to need or want you. You joined a gang, you took drugs, you learned to smoke, you had sex long before you were ready. You somehow survived your overcrowded High School years only to find out that as soon as High School was over and you were no longer a convenient two row’s away in English class, the friends that were so close could no longer be bothered to drive across town to see you. They had better things to do.
Determined to make it on your own, you decided to get a real education — because you knew that nobody without four degrees can actually get a job that pays anything — but discovered that the waiting lists to get in a good college are so long, they can pick and choose out of millions of prospective students, and dump all but the rarest gems. If you weren’t an A+++ student, or a full-blooded Eskimo, there was no room for you. And if you were white, forget it. America has too many white people. Only Burger King wants them.
So you dropped out of a Community College, which was overcrowded and underfunded, and got a job. But because there were 45 other people pounding on your boss’s door waving their resumés in the air, you had to kiss ass real good to stay employed. A little mean king on his little mean throne, your boss abused and mocked you every day you worked for him, until he finally fired you because he didn’t need you…
You got a girl or boyfriend, and for a moment you felt as if the world was finally right! Someone needed you! At last, for the very first time in your life, you had a focus, a center, a purpose to be living and breathing. You were thrilled beyond your ability to think. But after shopping around a little bit, your girl or boyfriend found about twenty other people they liked better than you, and dumped you for the next one. After all, there’s more fish in the sea.
You tried to become an artist, because you had talent. You picked up an instrument, you painted, you wrote poetry, you acted, only to discover that a million other people with exactly the same amount of talent as you (and uncannily similar ideas as yours) were competing for the same single spot open to the masses. If you didn’t somehow find a way to cheat, you didn’t win. Nobody who plays by the rules will make it.
Disillusioned, you turned to crime. But even that is overcrowded! Everyone and their uncle is doing something illegal, the cops are the worst criminals of all, and the jails are so crammed full that most of the time they won’t lock people up anymore because there is no room. In fact, in an ironic twist, there are criminals competing to get into prison, because it feeds you, clothes you, houses you, and keeps you away from living with your parents. And with modern humanitarian laws, prisons are nicer than most ghettos.
So what do you do? We have the luxury in this glut of wasted human lives to collect rarities. We only want Eskimos and child prodigies. Anything else is surplus. Back when I was a child artist they told me; use it or lose it. Take all the opportunities you can now to build yourself a resumé, because when you get older, they won’t want you anymore. I thought that was crazy; after all, they wanted me for my art, and I would only get better with time, right? No. They wanted me for my age. My art did improve as I moved through my 20’s into my 30’s, but now nobody will take me. They aren’t looking for talent. Just novelty.
There is one place left in this world where a tiny speck of decency remains: the rich and elite are born with it all, and they keep it all, because rich children’s parents will use contacts to make a life for their kids. The rich still live in a ‘village’ mentality — they still network. There is still a remnant of the concepts of honor, trust, and reliability in the elite circles. They will help one another, they will hire one another’s kids, and they will plan for the future of their children. And this is all a good thing.
The money and the opportunities and the best spots on the earth are reserved; not for the poor and those outside the ‘society’, but only for those few and meager persons within. But because there are so few elite children for a large amount of crème jobs, this virtually guarantees that all the top positions on the earth will be filled with idiots, while the really talented people among the seething masses will be trampled down and starved to death, never having been offered a single chance.
Why? Because of fear. Because the rich see how desperate and mean the seeing masses are getting in their constant, vicious forced competition, and they are afraid of letting a wild beast like that into their genteel domain. What if he murdered someone? Better to give the job to Johnny who can barely hold a pencil than risk hearing that battered old allycat cuss at the dinner table or something.
So here you sit; poor, out of work because your resumé isn’t spectacular enough and you’re not an Eskimo (in fact you’re probably white, shame on you), dumped because you didn’t matter to your former fiancée, a washed-out artist because your talent isn’t flashy enough to out-compete a million others, ignoring your parents who only come around when they feel bad and want you to stroke them, with no friends because they can all find cooler people to be with. And to top it all off, you’re too stubborn to commit suicide, because you know to your heart this is not the way it’s supposed to be. You know something can change, something has to change, and something will change.
But what?
This is the situation millions of young Americans wake up to every single morning, and their parents wonder why they are always depressed. Parents who, themselves, grew up in a world where the idea of showing a child that you need and want him was at least still the cultural norm.
We have nothing. We devalue ourselves, because we are not valued by anyone around us. We all feel that we are useless, worthless, trash, because that is what our entire lives keep telling us. We watch the movies and we feel sick to the core of our being in a way that we often cannot explain. Those movies are all reminiscing about the 60’s and 70’s, sometimes the 50’s, decades that we neither remember nor want to remember. The movies were made by ‘them’ for ‘them’, and all the movies laugh triumphantly about their freedom from responsibility; how by not needing nor wanting their children, by having endless recreational sex without responsibility, the elder generations cut themselves free.
But their own foolishness will destroy them. Because they have just created sixty million really, really angry people.
“They” tell us to grow up and be a man or woman; tough it out. Make it on your own. Go out and hack out a place in this jungle. But they are telling us to do what they themselves were never forced to do; they grew up in a world where the elder generation looked after the younger, or at least pretended to. They know not of what they speak. They have no idea that by forcing their children to do something inhumanly hard, something they themselves never had to do, we are in fact becoming much, much stronger than them… and ready to explode.
They built a human timebomb. No one ever ‘gets away with’ anything, there is always a consequence; and the longer it is delayed, the bigger the explosion will be. The rebellion of the 60’s — the results of the introduction of the birth control pill and condom — didn’t just fade away. It is here, inside us, inside sixty million children who are just about at the end of our human endurance and patience.
Oh, we’ve tried. We wanted to be accepted and loved. We thought that if we obeyed and did what we were supposed to, that they would suddenly realize they needed and wanted us. But they think they can keep us down by running us endlessly through the same old routine: go get a job, hack it out for yourself, make yourself a place, stop whining, stop clinging, get away from me and go… just go. Go to the other side of the planet where I don’t have to know you exist. Go somewhere else and be as happy as I think I am, as free and irresponsible as I have been, somewhere that I don’t know about.
It has been a carnival of sorts… a wild ride for forty years. They are all turning sixty plus now, the power suits, the business owners, the leaders and politicians, the last of the baby boomers who set up the revolution for their younger siblings and helped them along. Their lives have been full and good, free from shame, free from anything but selfish ambition and pursuit of hedonism. They cut off their relatives, they cut off their parents and children, and now they own the world. Everything is all about them.
But what they are ignoring will quietly simmer until one day the pressure gets just a little too high…
All Generation X — the generation of nothing — has left is to destroy the world that doesn’t have any room for us; because when 60+ million Americans are all not needed nor wanted, it’s not just us. It’s Them.
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