Reluctant Accord

I receive e-mail updates from DemandProgress.org, which usually bring me saddening news of how our rights are being flushed down the shitter every day. While I haven't been surprised by the willingness of our lawmakers to ignore the Constitution in favor a few hundred votes, I'm increasingly appalled by the lethargy exhibited by "my fellow Americans" /tongueincheek.

While at work, I'll often get e-mails sent to me and (quite frequently) the rest of our staff detailing anything from anecdotes about how smart all the childwen are for believing in God and the things they're willing to do for a prayer all the way to outrageous claims about the atrocities heaped upon our soldiers fighting the good fight Over There. Sometimes I'll even get e-mails saying that President Obama has admitted that he intends to bankrupt the country (and other such unsubstantiated claims) and that the Tea Party and the Republic of MO need to team up to do battle with the NWO. You know, crazy shit like that you wouldn't generally think more than twice about.

So why is it that my coworkers will readily send and receive these e-mails, but request that I cease forwarding completely true and relevant messages about the Internet Blacklist Bill? Is it because they'd rather cry for a couple of minutes about our current levee situation than actually take notice of what's going on in Congress? Yes, yes, I know that politics are big and scary and that it's a lot easier to understand "levee break, water get big, house flooded." But even if you don't give a damn about your own rights, at least consider those of the future generations, if we can even expect to have any with the rate at which our world is spinning closer to oblivion.

Oh, but I suppose that apathy for future generations is why life becomes crappier every day for the average person. As the geniuses behind Futurama pointed out, the general consensus in the past has been "create a problem now, let the smarties in the future figure out a solution." As our idiocracy grows more and more rampant, there are fewer smarties to go around solving the problems created by the morons who continue to breed. Which, I suppose, leads me to a conundrum. I'm ready to believe I'm one of the youngest, if not the youngest person employed by my company. How is it that my elders seem to know/care far less about the workings of their country than someone twenty, thirty, even forty years their junior? How can someone live that long and learn so little?

I once had a very distressing conversation with one of the women I work with. Disclaimer: she is a very nice, incredibly patient woman about whom I hesitate to say anything negative. On the other hand, she's kind of an idiot (though she does her job very well). Somehow we got on the topic of gay marriage (I may have led the discussion in this direction to see how she felt about it, out of curiosity - not sure). She is the type who loves Jesus without really knowing why, so of course she has a single, baseless claim to make about allowing homosexuals to start families: it's not natural, mostly 'cause God says so.

I was hesitant to press the issue, but I did mention that heterosexual marriage has been on the declining end of success lately, and it hardly seems fair that two people who love each other should be turned away from an already buttfucked institution just because their private parts don't hug each other right. She simply shrugged, took a puff of her cigarette, and reiterated her point, in that "you really don't know what you're talking about because you're young" kind of way.

There's a lot that can be said of the paradox of experience accrual. How does one gain experience if one cannot get a job? I think the problem with older generations is that they like to pretend that we have had and are having similar experiences at the dawn of the 21st century that they had decades ago. They refuse to learn and understand new things because they're content without them. This is fine with me. What is not kosher is the fact that they always insist on taking the long way around when us young people have engineered and discovered any number of shortcuts. Even when we can prove that we're smarter than them, they still manage to chuckle and see our technology as nothing but a toy that we'll grow out of when the next big thing comes along.

Yeah...? So what? That's evolution, something I know you're loathe to agree with, since you have your dusty old tomes sitting securely in the filthy motel nightstands to tell you where Adam and Eve came from. It's nice that you're happy in your bubble of ignorance and self-preservation through accepting the terms of whomever has the bigger guns. But don't try to tell me I don't know anything just because I haven't sat in that same bubble for forty years.

And don't be surprised when your bubble is finally popped by the very people you thought were protecting it.