THE OLDER YOU GET, THE BETTER YOU WERE
Of course it happened nearly first thing this morning. “Did you hear what Trudeau said about us?”
There are few things more pathetic by definition than the old man who claims to be from tougher stock than “the easily offended new generation”, or the man who’ll blather on at length about how “kids these days…” something something, which is obviously not as strong, diligent, nor as smart as they were, “back in my day,” while showing off their wounds every time someone “tells it like it is.” The ironic part of continuing to hear those same tired tropes is, their elders said the same things about them.
While trying to state the obvious to the man, I was interrupted constantly by, “you know what needs to happen,” and “they oughta just…” as though things are even remotely as simple in this era as they were when you had three channels on your rabbit-eared black-and-white, Mom stayed home to tend to four kids and a mild pill addiction while dad went out with his 6th-grade education and made enough money to keep a roof over everyone’s heads. Sure, it’s so fucking simple.
It’s no different than when men started wearing their hair long, and the previous generation of men asked them if they were girls or boys, or when the generation of boys after that began wearing earrings in one or both ears and got called faggots for following shifting times. Generational change scares the old. They begin to feel their grip loosening, their relevance slipping away, and they’re scared of not having the voice they did when they were younger, yet experienced in their craft.
“He said we’re all just raping and pillaging!” said the old man with a smirk of self-assurance. “We’re all just scumbags up to make a buck and party.
“Come on now,” I said with more disdain for a guy whose skills, knowledge, and experience in the trade I absolutely respect. “You’re really exaggerating the comment that was made, and you know for a fact that the kinds of things he described absolutely happen in those environments.”
“Yeah sure it does, but who’s he to say that?!”
“Well, he is the Prime Minister, and because you don’t like him, you’re more than happy to twist the concerns he’s raising about what goes on when thousands of workers descend on the same area to work for weeks at a time. What did the clubs and bars and casinos look like in McMurray on Thursday nights during those expansions?”
“Yeah, sure, but he’s still painting us all with the same brush.”
“Sure he is,” I said, “because those are the concerns raised after two decades of nearly endless expansion in the Northwest. My cousin had to go to rehab at 15, and don’t think for a second that growing up in Fort McMurray had nothing to do with it. My buddy quit his job as an equipment operator because the money selling cocaine was so good.”
We’re hitting the shift these days, and unlike previous eras, when cultural change might have gone largely unnoticed, the interconnectedness of our time shines a massive spotlight on the disparity between the opportunities available to young people now, and the ones that were available before. We can barely afford groceries for ourselves, let alone our kids, because the same company owns most of the grocery stores and sets its prices as a near monopoly. Gasoline runs at obscene profits (spare me the bitching about federal excise taxes), and home ownership in the past 30 years became more a game of acquisition for the moneyed few than an opportunity to build a family and life for the young.
Do we make some mistakes with our money? Of course we do, but the due to wage stagnation in blue collar work, and the gig economy that younger, college-educated people are forced to engage in due to the devaluing of nearly all forms of creative work, our financial missteps are compounded almost immediately. Add in the massive rise in college tuitions over the past 40 years, and higher education is beyond young people from certain socio-economic backgrounds.
The Boomers who tell us we’re entitled won’t leave their cushy jobs and make room for younger people to move up or to even enter certain industries because they’ve still got late-life crises to afford themselves. The advance of technology is making some manual labour jobs extinct due to automation and engineering. I met a man of about 53 in a Tim Hortons on my way back from Manitoba at Christmas last year who had recently sold his drilling company. He told me that the same hole that required three weeks with 20 men working around the clock 30 years ago, now required a week’s time with 5 people. “Advanced engineering and precision detection really increased our profits,” he said.
I never asked that man about what they got up to back when he was out on the rigs, and what they’d do when they got a night off in town. I didn’t have to. I’ve seen and heard blue collar men talk and behave my whole life. Am I innocent? No, I’ve had my share of rowdy nights. I’m also not willing to be oblivious, or to get all bent out of shape when the person who represents our country on the world stage makes a valid point about things I’ve seen up close. I’m not here stumping for Justin Trudeau. He’s made some dopey decisions, has alienated a number of groups by making tough choices that were more based on conscience than politics (while making some bad decisions that were based on exactly the opposite) and has walked back some initiatives from his campaign that would have made a big difference in this country. He’s also one of the most respected leaders in in the world, and gives our country a good image to the rest of the world. There’s a reason old people don’t like him. It’s the same reason that the nutbag right was able to smear Obama during his entire presidency, and why new leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the new targets of the conservative outrage machine.
They represent the next generation, the one that holds the future, while the elders slowly realize that their time is more finite than they’d previously thought. Their kids are making decisions without consulting them first. They’ve retained some influence, obviously, or else we wouldn’t have to deal with the sad reflection of conservative thought draining from that movement’s leaders down to the general populace. The aging would like someone to blame for their failures, troubles, or their slide into irrelevance, in the same way we younger people want someone to blame for inheriting a world that has become increasingly hostile, both personally and environmentally. The difference is that we have forty years of hard, factual evidence to show that previous generations did everything in the power to grasp as much of the world as they were able to, and to raise the costs of possibility and opportunity for the young to reaches that are nearly unscalable. We’ve been left a lot of things to clean up, and while we appreciate the efforts and experience of our elders to guide us to this point, perhaps its time for them to finally let the torch go.
\m/
TwoEars/OneMouth 