“Now this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That when I get older, these kids are going to take care of me.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
–The Breakfast Club, 1985
Since I reluctantly entered the workforce in the mid-1990’s, my dad’s berated me for not contributing a ridiculous percentage of my income to a 401K plan in favor of spending it on whiskey and cigarettes in my own personal Die Before My Joints Go And I Get Bitchy retirement plan.
After the last couple of days, with the stock market having pissed away pretty much every dime every human being in America’s invested since 1997, I look like less like a live-in-the-now fatalist than a forward-thinking genius, and my retired dad’s wishing that back in 1976, instead of quitting Winstons, he’d switched to Luckies, or maybe black tar heroin.
Since circumstances have shown me to have an innate and basic understanding of the economy, if not American society at large, please allow me to use my new position as Futurist Pundit to humbly suggest, on not only my own behalf, but on behalf of Generation X as a whole, that Baby Boomers might consider shutting the fuck up and stopping telling us what to do, because clearly you fuckers don’t know shit.
We should have started seeing it when we were in high school, a part of our youth we frankly pissed away when you told us that sex was fatal and drugs were a death sentence. Which we suffered through, keeping our eyes on the big one-eight… only to be told that you’d suddenly decided that not only was eighteen not old enough to use the one legal drug you’d left us, but that if we did use it, you would clap us in irons if we just did anything outrageous, like trying to get fucking home.
These are hard things to hear from a group of people who get nostalgically misty about eating acid and sticking it in anyone whose fight or flight reflex didn’t trigger fast enough, but we heard and we (generally) obeyed… only to hit twenty-one and see Magic Johnson live for twenty years and realize that the reason you were able to lecture us about the dangers of drugs so calmly was because you were on Prozac.
So we graduated college, ready to make up for lost time for a little while… and you told us we were slackers. You said that we needed to get real jobs, like you had, and hated. After all: you didn’t sacrifice and save to raise us and put us through college to watch us be happy; it was time for some fucking payback.
So we did. And not only did we get jobs, we invented a whole new industry. Happy now? Of course not.
Oh, you shoveled your money into it and told us that we were changing the world… right until a few of you dipshits realized that it might take a while before your investments earned enough for the Mercedes C Class. Then you used the products we created to sell high, email your friends about how smart you were to get your money out, and call us on your new free-long-distance-plan Razr to berate us for spending so much time fucking around on unemployment.
There was nothing more joyful in the late 90’s than hearing your parents express relief for divesting in the industry that laid you off with one breath, and then demanding you use your sudden copious free time to visit them and fix the computer they now rely on with the next. I suddenly understood how my little brother felt when I asked him why he kept hitting himself.
But then you told us that there was a silver lining: what we should be doing is investing in real estate, because after all, they’re not making any more of it, unlike, say, bullshit financial advice.
So you had your Baby Boomer president set it up so any dingbat who could write his own name and a made-up salary figure without giggling in abject shame could buy a house with no money down… houses, purely by coincidence, owned and built by you. At least Tom Sawyer only had a bucket of whitewash; imagine how Ben Rogers would have felt if he turned the corner and found Tom with a bucket of whitewash, a raging hard-on, a tube of Astroglide, and a collection plate.
So home prices shot up like Belushi using someone else’s liver, allowing you to flip out at a huge profit (My parents flipped out twice, turning one retirement home into two, in two different resort communities), and sticking us with starter shitholes we can’t even refinance, let alone sell, since one of your boys figured out how to turn a contract against a tangible asset into an incomprehensible set of magic beans he could resell for a few extra bucks… meaning we’d have been better off making a deal with the Devil, who’s at least smart enough to hold on to the original contract. If Satan was as dumbassed greedy as you pigs, the damned wouldn’t have anywhere to go, and then you fuckers would never die.
Aaaaand now here we are… but there is a silver lining: you Baby Boomers are old now. You’re retiring. So shut your selfish lie-holes and start acting like it. Sit back and leave it to us to try to figure a way out of this mess you’ve left us. Enjoy your paid-for retirement homes, go out to a mushy early-bird dinner with your retired Baby Boomer friends, pay for it with money out of Social Security that we’re still paying into, and trade bullshit about how you were at Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury, and how you were the generation that changed America. Because you are.
You ruined it.
[tags]Stock Market crash, economic crisis, recession, Baby Boomers, Generation X, slackers, Real Estate crash, dark humor, satire[/tags]
