“Just wait until they get to the real world.”
This simple sentence represents the last stand of the boomer resistance. It is the boomer mind’s last cope, defending against the existential terror of a world hurtling toward a beige and confusing future, one in which even calling on the phone to order a pizza requires a support animal and trigger warning. It is the extinction burst guarding against the egoless ennui of imagining some mysterious future dystopia in which people are enslaved, not by a totalitarian government, but by a monolithic culture that demands obeisance to unstable norms of language and acquiescence to multiple invisible disabilities that seem capable of dissolving one’s personal responsibility whenever it fits their purpose.
It’s not that I disagree with this; I too am flummoxed by the fact that I always seem to be wrong when talking about “people of color.” For the first thirty years of my life, we referred to them as “minorities.” Then somewhere along the line that was seen as demeaning (or something?) and then it became “marginal populations.” Then it didn’t seem nice to put some people on the margin (maybe?), and then it morphed into “vulnerable populations.” Then we didn’t much like the idea of referring to them as “vulnerable,” since this didn’t seem to credit the huge amount of resilience that one develops while facing the myriad injuries - micro and macro - of systemic racism. So throw that one out, and throw out “disadvantaged” while you’re at it. You may think this would indicate that they should be referred to as “advantaged” populations, but that is just your white supremacy hectoring you into a position of ironic defiance, a sort of malicious compliance that shows that racism is still alive and well today.
While this is not a new phenomenon - the recycling of euphemisms and the slow evolution of a word from the “sensitive” choice to the “ironically hurtful” choice has been identified before - it is certainly happening faster than ever before, with current linguistic changes coming down the pike at a head-spinning pace that few people other than those with preposterous academic titles can keep up with (see for example the rapid adoption of the gender-neutral “Latinx” which seemed to be approved by just about everyone other than “Latinx” people). Just the other day, I received a notification from my HR department’s “Equity Newsletter” that the covert racists claim of being colorblind (i.e. those terrible racists who say “I don’t see race, I treat all people the same”) was no longer acceptable, as this was offensive to those who suffered from actual colorblindness. I was informed by this handy newsletter, that was written for my personal edification and not at all to shame me into linguistic compliance and ergo corporate servility, that I should avoid offending colorblind people by instead referring to these racists as “color evasive.” This was especially interesting to me, not only because it is mind-numbingly inane, tendentious, and censorious, but also because I am actually colorblind. I didn’t even know I was offended!
In the end, the boomer cannot deal with the proliferation of this new regime of harum-scarum language taxonomy. This is not because they are obstinate, even though they have good cause to be considering very few people actively engaged in the workforce can truly keep up with this silliness that seems almost designed to produce intermittent failures that can be arbitrarily used to punish employees (usually who are guilty of some other protected offense such as having one or more divergent political opinions). It is not because the boomer is ignorant, either. Ironically, most boomers I interact with are the most well-informed people I know. These are, after all, the people out there who actually have the time to watch C-SPAN, read the entire terms of service, and attend emergency town council meetings on whether or not to allow a local bar to expand into the adjacent lot to build an outdoor sand volleyball court.
No, the boomer does not rebel against the new world order because of stupidity or orneriness, but instead for the simple reason that the boomer doesn’t know how to use the paralinguistic techniques one needs to absolve themselves of the sins of their identity in real-time. The boomer doesn’t know how to use self-deprecating tones in their language. They don’t know how to smirk in such a way as to say, “I’m a colonizing piece of shit that literally supports violence against trans women of color by virtue of my mere existence.” The boomer doesn’t know how to casually refer to themselves as racist, abusive, privileged, insecure, hateful, sinful, perverse, and unclean in that certain vocalic tone that hits the sweet spot between harmlessness and total spiritual castration.
So why does the millennial survive where the boomer dies? Though the millennial can be equally susceptible to the same sort of misfires that lead to sudden resignations and 63-tweet apologies (which are simultaneously demanded and also a form of violence, fyi). The millennial - though equally confused about the rapid changes in appropriate terminology to talk about…non-white (?) BIPOC (?) people - saves themselves by subtle prostrations that happen between our words. If millennials are skilled at anything, it’s laying down on the ground to be gleefully trampled by those who demand your fealty. So while I don’t know exactly how to refer to “Non-married African American genderqueer mothers between the ages of 18 and 35,” I do know how to say, “this group - which some people who look like me might refer to as ‘marginalized’ (throws up big, defiant, satirical air quotes with my hand) - suffers from some of the worst peripartum health outcomes inside or outside of the hospital.” The students nod in approval at the way I’ve said this. Not because they are glad to have received this dire health information, but because I have sufficiently demonstrated my privilege, ignorance, and lack of authority.
This is the true coin of the realm; submission. The ability for a white cis-gendered heterosexual male to artfully signal their passivity, docility, and irrelevance, determines how well they are accepted by the many they/them’s sitting in the classroom. A significant portion of the educator and students’ brainpower is dedicated to this kabuki of self-flagellation. Many have not gotten the memo; they remain willful and obstinate, addicted to outdated modes of understanding the world such as “logic” and “free inquiry.” They say something they shouldn’t say, such as that a certain statement used to justified censorship of free speech is based on overblown or even fully factitious statistics, and then they simply refuse to apologize. The blowback is swift and fierce to these thick-skulled individuals. They are dealt with by an increasingly sadistic mob, many of which are completely comfortable wishing the worst sorts of social, emotional, and even physical torture upon them.
Millennials see this mob action, and we metabolize the lesson quickly. We are much quicker in our adaptation for many reasons, chief among them our increased familiarity with social media/internet culture as well as our financial insecurity. Many of us, such as myself, have little to no “nest egg” to fall back on. Should we be fired from our jobs - especially in a public way that follows us for a long time - we have no problem imagining how triggering a massive institutional boycott against us could quickly lead us to sleeping on our parents’ couch for the rest of our lives, or even worse: homelessness.
Terrified of falling into this inescapable chasm of social and professional shunning, we use the skills we developed during our 20s when we thought we could “do one of those startup companies.” We Google and we YouTube and we Reddit and we scour the interwebs in a quest to unlock the proper distinction between “Hispanic” and “Latino.” We do this important work not because we give a shit (no one actually does), but instead to survive; to figure out how to talk and act in order to stay as far away as possible from being mentioned on Twitter or recorded with a camera phone in a park for doing some outrageous white supremacist activity like asking someone to turn their music down because you’re there with a six week old and their ears are still developing.
Many of my peers certainly go overboard, such as an acquaintance of mine who once posted a facebook status that literally just said, “White people are fucking trash.” This post hilariously catalyzed several black friends to comment responses along the lines of, “dude…chill.” Some of the “first movers” in the white simp market who initially liked the post slowly and quietly un-liked the post over the next several hours, until the post - now bereft of any likes at all - was unceremoniously deleted between 2 and 4am.
But most of us don’t go quite that far, and those who do are lost to the self-appointed position of “revolutionary vanguard,” which in this day and age includes little throwing of molotov cocktails, and more doing call-ins to “discuss the recent company poster that seems to equate the dreidel with gambling and ergo serves as an anti-semitic trope centered on Jewish people and their relationship to the international banking system.” In other words, most of the true cunts of whatever the hell is happening today are actually millennials out to prove “I’m one of the good ones.” If you ever take the time to categorize who are the most agonizing and obnoxious components of the zeitgeist, many of them are millennials out to get cookie scraps of approval from people 15 years younger than them.
Most of us just don’t want to get fired, and we certainly don’t want to be noticed as the exemplar of ignorant Karens or Kens (?). We hone our ability to nod just enough but not too much, to chuckle at the ignorant statements of those who haven’t caught up yet, and cast stones big enough to prove that we’re “for real,” but not too big so as to mortally wound our poor confused colleague who is still dumb enough to say something like “I think everyone should be treated equally.”
It’s truly a sickening charade, one that eats away at your soul. If you’re anything like me, you console yourself with the belief that once you hit a certain milestone of financial freedom (such as shrugging off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that you took on to attend these institutions of higher learning that are chiefly responsible for the ideology that comprises your current miserable predicament), then you’ll go on the offensive. Having endured the sickening demand to conform to these current norms that can only be described as “maximally retarded,” you tell yourself that you will expose these twats for the tiny totalitarians they actually are.
You save your work emails, each one more outrageous than the next. You take notes at meetings that were supposed to be about materials science but end up being about why heteronormativity is the biggest threat to the security of our nation. You nod and smile, you betray your conscience, you wish you were stronger but you have seen what happens when someone stands up to this stuff. Everyone else bows their head and clenches their eyes shut as you receive lash after social lash. We have seen truth-tellers brought to their knees, expelled from their livelihood into the margins of existence. At best, they get a second career as a Brett Weinstein or Jordan Peterson type. But you’re no Jordan Peterson; you’re barely a Jesse Signal.
So what can you do? You can tell us a thousand times that we have to “rise up against this madness.” But why? Almost everyone who rose up is never heard from again. Surely it’s a wretched existence to have to choke back your true beliefs in order to satisfy a rabid majority of regime apostles. But is this really anything new? Did our forefathers not do the same during the inquisition, the witch trials, the McCarthyism era? We might be cowards, but at least we’re not destitute. Fuck a nest egg, I don’t even have the requisite “three months income” saved up to transition between jobs. So am I going to volunteer to read the land acknowledgement at this week’s team huddle? You bet your ass I am.
I suppose at this point I have complained enough that I owe my reader a solution. I certainly don’t want to give the same old solutions you’ve been being fed this whole time. I don’t want to salve your worries by saying “the pendulum has swung too far; it will swing back.” The pendulum has spun in a full 360 and is still spinning…it’s never swinging back. The only thing I can offer as a reprieve is this: do not stay quiet. Do not hold all of this in. Invent an alternate identity if you have to, tell your boomer parents, bitch about it during vape breaks with like-minded co-workers. If this shit-show du jour was caused by electrically transmitted cultural undercurrents swelling to a boiling point, then the opposition can work the same way. If we continue to catalogue and share the absurdity of this regime; if we are persistent in our presentation of the frailty of their internal inconsistencies, then we won’t have to “pick the right time to speak up.” It will just happen. It will be that moment when the average person, the one who doesn’t have this substack bookmarked, who doesn’t even know what substack is at all, will finally stand up and say those 19 magical words:
“Man…I don’t know what you’re talking about but it sounds like total bullshit. Just shut the fuck up.”
You exaggerate the consequences of simply quitting your job/profession. You won't be pushed into the "margins of existence" if you don't have three months' salary saved up. People do it all the time. However you define homelessness, you won't end up without shelter or food. You'd even be better off than the guy you describe who doesn't read substack articles.
Are you hemmed in by fear of a bad credit score? Is that misery on the margin of existence? (Is your non-substack reader a miserable person on the margin of existence?)
Which predicament is worse?