And worship has never been easier. All you have to do by way of praise and adoration is think well of yourself. It’s another new sin not to. Self-esteem is a human right. You are a good person. You are an excellent person. Look at your tattoos—you’re a signed masterpiece.
But what happens if one of you wants to be more than merely holier-than-thou? All they has to do—using the plural pronoun as singular to show how grammar needs a theological correction—is recycle something. Preferably something indicating “awareness” and “engagement” such as an empty container of organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, locally sourced, fair-traded drain cleaner. Being holier-than-globally-everybody is a sustainable alternative for the progressively minded faithful.
And Charles Dudley Warner’s quip “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it”? That is so early-Trump-campaign. Everybody you know is devoutly stopping climate change. The way you did when you made obeisance over the bins marked “glass,” “paper,” “polypropylene plastic,” “polystyrene plastic,” and “biodegradables”—worshiping the garbage can.
Meanwhile everybody I know is having a much more amusing life.
Why Kids R Commies
And Never Mind How the Free Market Bankrupted that Backwards R Big Box Store that Once Held a Greedy Monopoly on Selling Toys
America’s young people have veered to the left. Opinion pollsters tell us so. According to a November 2019 Gallup Poll, “Since 2010 young adults’ positive ratings of socialism have hovered near 50%.” A March 2019 Axios poll concurs, saying that 49 percent of millennials would “Prefer living in a socialist country.” And The Hill puts it more strongly, citing an October 2019 YouGov Internet survey in a story headed, “7 in 10 Millennials Say They’d Vote for a Socialist.”
Traditional liberalism still exists. In a March 2018 Pew Research Center study of Americans age 22–37, 57 percent called themselves “mostly” or “consistently” liberal.
But “mostly” or “consistently” liberal may not be enough for young voters. This was evident in the 2018 congressional elections. Ten-term incumbent congressmen Michael Capuano (D. Mass.) and Joe Crowley (D. NY) were as mostly consistently liberal as they come. And they were kicked to the curb in Democratic primaries by leftists Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
What’s the matter with kids today? Nothing new. A large portion of the brats, the squirts, the fuzz-faced, the moon claves, the sap-green, and the wet behind the ears have always been “Punks for Progressives.”
As soon as children discover that the world isn’t nice, they want to make it nicer. And wouldn’t a world where everybody shares everything be nice? Aw . . . Kids are so tender-hearted.
But kids are broke—so they want to make the world nicer with your money. And kids don’t have much control over things—so they want to make the world nicer through your effort. And kids are very busy being young—so it’s your time that has to be spent making the world nicer.
For them. The greedy little bastards. Kids were thinking these exact same sweet-young-thing thoughts back in the 1960s, during my salad days (tossed green sensimilla buds). Young people probably have been thinking these same thoughts since the concept of being a “young person” was invented.
That would have been in the nineteenth century—during America’s first “Progressive Era”—when mechanization liberated kids from onerous farm chores and child labor laws let them escape from child labor.
This gave young people the leisure to sit around noticing that the world isn’t nice and daydreaming about how it could be made nicer with the time, effort, and money of grow-ups.
I’m all for sending them back to the factories or, at least, the barn. If I hear any socialist noise from my kids I’m going to make them get up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows. And this will be an extra-onerous farm chore because we don’t have any cows, and they’ll have to search for miles all over the countryside to find some.
They’ve got it coming. Young people are not only penniless and powerless, they’re also ignorant as hell. They think of wealth as something that’s limited, like the number of Hostess Ding Dongs on the 7-Eleven shelf. They think rich people got to the 7-Eleven first and gobbled all the Ding Dongs, leaving poor people to lick the plastic wrappers.
Young people don’t know that more Ding Dongs can be produced. They don’t know how or why more Ding Dong production is possible. And they certainly don’t know how to get the cream filling inside.
(Leaving aside the wild indignation of young people about the very existence of synthetic industrial and undoubtedly poisonous food such as Ding Dongs. They eat them anyway. Watch them shop at the 7-Eleven when they think nobody’s looking. But I digress.)
Young people believe that the way to obtain more wealth is to take it away from rich people. You can’t do it. Well, you can do it. But you can only do it once.
You can take the Ding Dongs from the Hostess factory for free, but once you’ve eaten them you can’t go back to the Hostess factory and take more Ding Dongs for free. The Hostess factory is out of business. (Which may protect our health, reduce environmental pollution, and preserve various species of animals such as the high fructose corn weevil, which, for all I know, is endangered. Although, considering that Pew Research claims even more millennials [69 percent] favor cannabis legalization than favor socialism, somebody’s going to be sorry when they get the munchies. But I digress again.)
Young people are so ignorant about wealth that they think wealth is limited to what arrives at the 7-Eleven with the Hostess deliveryman. The reason they think this is because young people are still in school or have been recently.
School, while not without its benefits, carries the risk of over-exposure to intellectuals. And intellectuals, when it comes to understanding economic realities, are Ding Dongs.
The nineteenth century spawning of idle, dreamy, feckless young people arrived just in time for the Marxist intellectual fad. And Marxist thinking
