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July 07, 2004
What now?
So we all went through our nihilist period. Learned that everything we've been raised to believe in – everything anyone's believed in for a long time – is a big lie. We know the government lied to us, and the Church is at best irrelevant and at worst truly malicious, and our parents fucked us up in all kinds of ways. We even had a mass media-approved tag for it: Generation X. A whole generation dedicated to righteous indignation at the failure of God, Country, and Family to do anything other than screw us over. 'Cause, y'know, it does take some getting used to.
So what now? Once we've brought everything crashing down and hit bottom, where do we go from there?
Two possibilities:
The first would be to go back to Daddy. Decide things aren't as bad as we thought they were. Sure, they made some mistakes, but they had our best interests at heart. And if anything bad happened to us, we probably deserved it anyway.
Popular choice. Look at the "USA: Love it or Leave it" crowd. What should we apologize for? We're the greatest country in the world! Or join (or rejoin) one of your approved-Big-3-Western-monotheistic religions. It does seem young people are turning to youth ministries in record numbers. "Look, we just think that the way our parents' generation did things was just a little too…permissive. It feels so much better to have some clear rules."
And I understand. Really I do. It feels much safer in the cage. But what if you can't go back? If you've burned too many bridges and it's just too painful and too close to home and too near the bone?
Then you've got to make something new.
How? Hell, I don't know. Ransack the past. Take what's worth holding onto and jettison the rest. Most of it's just a way to keep old battles and hatreds alive anyway. Go somewhere quiet enough you can actually hear what you want. Look at who could, if push came to shove, make you do something you didn't want to. Ask: are they really worth submitting to? Or have they just been telling you what to do for so long you forgot it was them talking and not you?
What would you do if you only got one shot at life, and you don't know how long you have, and it really mattered? How long are you willing to wait for your life to start?
'Cause me, I'm tired of being angry. Tired of only thinking about how much I've been fucked over by God or Dick Cheney or psychiatry or the upper 1% or a bunch of people who died so long ago their names don't even matter. It's all bullshit? That's old news. Tell me something I don't know. I'm busy building a life here.
You can't feel cheated forever, you know.
Posted by StephenRauch at July 7, 2004 01:45 PM