Baby Boomers Bust

When my Father was younger, he told me, he thought he belonged to the best generation that's ever showed up on planet earth. They were the boomers. They invented the whole idea of the Generation Gap by starting a mass rebellion that, even when they were all teeny-boppers, was starting to re-shape America around whatever happened to catch them as their latest whim. There were tons of products invented on the spot and back then, most of them thought all the attention was on them because they were just so darn smart. Now we know the only reason there was a lot of attention was because of their numbers.

The majority of my father's generation settled down, got married, had me and many other MTV Generation folks, raised families and, uh, matured. Everyone else it seems, went into politics. And here we are today, with our still-adolescent yet older baby boomers running the country, shouting from coast to coast, filling the airwaves and papers with more verbal diarrhea than one could ever hope to wipe from their own bottom, unleashing an unprecedented wave of behavioral incontinence that we get to enjoy these days in our politics.

It reminds me of the playground. There was always one bunch yelling 'she's got cooties!!!" and the other was running to tell the teacher. The only problem now is, there ain't no teacher for these folks. The inmates are truly running the asylum. As a country, we grant power to those kids who throw the loudest temper tantrum. If we could only get them to hold their breaths instead of screaming, might might actually get somewhere these days.

Even I'm old enough to remember the day when you could pick up a newspaper, magazine, or whatever and read flat-out news. No opinion, no nothing. News. Not the dog farted loudly. Just that the dog farted. Only the important stuff. Now that the Baby Boomers are in power, I get to be treated to a whole host of 'news' stories that revolve around, not the event, but one of those he-said-she-said tattling sessions you'd find on a school playground. Newspaper reporters are these neo-hall monitors who wait, ready to pounce at the prospect of the next verbal infraction or speech code violation that seems to change from day to day without rhyme nor reason. A speech code that only the reporters seem to understand.

Our elections for President of the United States now more resemble the idiotic class officer elections I used to participate in in high school rather than anything issues-driven. Now, if you don't look cute on a campaign button or sound catchy-cool on a 2-second sound bite, forget it. Stick a fork in you. You're done. If you're a member of the Democratic Party, you need to have either the correct genitalia or the right skin color. I've never, in my whole entire short life, seen such incredible levels of political pandering to get elected. Remember the girl who always pledge to make every day in the cafeteria 'pizza day' or bring in a 'soft serve ice cream machine' in for everyone to use whenever they wanted to use it? At least for much of my formative child hood, the principals and teachers still ran the school. The class officers could recommend, but didn't really have any real power to enact our truly inconsequential if not down right crappy ideas. Now the crazy school officer candidate DOES make the decisions. They run the federal government.

Ah and who can forget about the Pelosi Pack, who are now in charge of congress. If you don't like what you've seen thus far, I've got news for you: Things are going to get a whole lot worse. This particular woman seems to be every negative thing about the female human nature all rolled up into one overbearing princess who just cannot wait to bang her little pink gavel and wail for our attention.

Now that she's got our attention, what does she do with it? She screams "No fair!, No fair!" every time someone disagrees with her and she figures, of course, it's because she's a girl. She parades her grandchildren on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as though that's supposed to give real weight to her supposed authority. If any man ever did that, he'd be laughed out of the country. But no one's laughing at Nancy0 at least not in public- because they all know the kind of female fit that would ensue from her and the princess' minions.

Take the meaningless Iraq disapproval resolution. She acts like we just went over to play a game of tag with meany-face Saddam, and now that we tagged him- and killed him- its time to come home and leave their playground and come home for a kool-aid break. But that big, bad bully Bush won't let us. So let's throw a public pout to let the whole world know that W is a bully, and we're too scared he will call us nasty names if we really take him on and cut off the money. He might say we're not patriotic, or that we're cowards/ "No fair! No fair!" The old sticks-and-stones thing really isn't true, because those words do hurt. Nancy thinks they would hurt so bad she just couldn't stand it, so she'll just pout until she gets her way.

At least Bush is still in charge, or at least he does evidence a bit more maturity. So far at least, he hasn't sunk too often to the sand box level. Maybe that's because he actually had to face real personal problems and resolve them without resorting to temper tantrums. Maybe it's because he is married to a real woman, who knows where to draw the line and make real demands on a real husband. Or maybe it's just because he was forced to actually grow up-- instead of remaining forever a flower child, going from playground to playground, protest to protest, making a whole lot of noise without accomplishing so much as a darned thing that could actually be called progress.

Unlike the boomers, at least my generation will leave school. Hopefully, we're not polluted with too much of their filth. I hope to god that the younger generations, like gen X right before me, my own MTV generation, Generation Y and the millenials, learn from our Parents' Generation- the one that kept the dirty bath water and threw out the baby instead. I hope we learned that the old American way of sturdy individualism, moral integrity, and respect for God and country really is worth saving. Because there's a big war on and if we continue down the same path our parents have been traveling, our children will be bowing to Allah 5 times a day, with their little iPods pointed towards Mecca.