From this to "corporations are people too!"
By Daniel Ford and Dave Pezza
I didn’t mean to poke the bear.
I usually get people going consciously. I’ve been in the mood to read/listen to something really rant-y and sassy all week, but I didn’t knowingly cause Dave Pezza to type so fast and angrily that his keyboard cracked from the pressure on Thursday morning. It started innocently enough. We were trading jokes back and forth about a variety of topics—free trade, the GM bailout, our generation—when I sent this reply:
“My father’s generation protested their brains out. We’ve got Occupy Wall Street.”
Well.
That’s really all Dave needed to get fired up.
I more or less sat back and watched as Dave proceeded to melt my computer screen. By the time you read this, he may or may not be protesting somewhere. You’ve been warned.
Dave Pezza Unleashed
Your father’s generation had something to give a shit about, we don’t.
However, they took all that away from us and then became the very people they were fighting against. Our generation has to fight a war of abstracts, not policy. And we don’t have the means to do so, mainly because we have been convinced that we are not capable of thinking and contributing unless we are 25, have had at least four years of college education, and have amassed enough debt to keep the banks happy. Last time I checked, an 18-year-old was a legal adult. Maybe we should spend less time protecting our “children” and more time culminating our young adults.
If you really consider the modern college system, it’s basically a system of generating money and a way to keep a generation of young adults financially dependent on the banking system. All the while, our ideas and experiences are degraded to juvenile notions when most of our parents’ generation was married with budding careers and children by the age of an average college senior.
(Daniel: “Um, is your keyboard on fire?” Dave: “Quite possibly.”)
I have a very strong and pissed off opinion about our parent’s generation. They have screwed up royally and refuse to admit to it. Don’t get me wrong, every generation has had hardships. But at least past generations recognized the impediments in their way. Ours is too distracted by bullshit like social media and inane, paltry complaints like Occupy Wall Street.
Just food for thought: The yuppies that our parent’s generation became are just now screwing us. Just one example is that we can’t own homes because they illegally decided that they were going to destroy the housing market. After working with a real-estate attorney for nine months and taking Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and US Bank to court for very obvious, but legally vague, widespread fraud, I have little to no respect for the opinions of older people who call my generation lazy. They could not have uttered a more ignorant statement in regards to the present economic conditions, and they are doing a grave injustice to the ideas that should have been passed down to them from their parents, who were one of the greatest generations of Americans in our short history.
(Daniel: “This is the best part of my day…and the saddest. My editor mind: ‘How can I compile this into a rant post?’” Dave: “Haha well I’m full of this shit, so if you need more, just poke the bear.” Daniel (to himself): “I’m willfully poking Dave with a stick at this point.”)
Point in case: NPR is running a profile on Candy Crush right now. There is a “gaming expert” literally explaining what Candy Crush is.
Holy damn.
I think, ultimately, people from the prior generation realized that getting money and improving their lives through the economic boom of the 1990s was far easier and more convenient than sticking to their ideals. Essentially, they got lazy. It just became way easier for them to stop giving a shit and ride out the system they thought they created. Little did they know that their whole "system" was just poising the country for the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. They all just sat back and thought, "Wow look how right and justified we were."
Wrong.
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