aka The Worst Generation

Tom Brokaw called my grand parents “The Greatest Generation.”  It was a cute little tag line to celebrate them surviving The Great Depression and then winning World War 2, beating up Nazis, and going to the moon.  That’s not a bad generation, I’ll admit.  The one that followed was a fucking ball of shit that’s fucked us all.  It’s The Worst Generation.  Thanks, mom and dad.

“Generations” are kind of hard to figure out because it’s not like we all stop having sex for a few years to clean the slate and then resume with a perfect line of demarcation.  So, by way of reference: I was born in 1983.  My parents’ generation – the shitty one – are folks born roughly post-war.  Baby Boomers, I think.  My dead father was born in 1948 and my mother was born in 195 – don’t you dare.  Uh, after him.  Figure 1945 to 1960 as that generation.

I’m not sure what the fuck Generation X is other than it sounds like a comic book marketing ploy.  Then there was a Generation Y, then Millennials and whatever.  I’m, I think a Y or Millennial (they might be the same thing).  Don’t care; I’m not part of The Shitty Generation. (Though this newer wave of young people is really something else.  Arrogant without accomplishment, these are the weirdos who post pictures of their buttholes on instagram … he says on a website he created.)

aka Generation Shit

So, Shit Generation and why it’s shit.  It may be the most self-righteous of generations and, like so many that are self-righteous, it absolutely fucked everything up and yet somehow thinks it has left behind some magic legacy.  It isn’t all bad, obviously, some of the Civil Rights Movement stuff was good and needed but the biggest, most horrible thing that Generation Shit did was fuck us all in the ass with debt.  Debt. Debt. Debt.

 

Generation Shit was the generation that really got going on creating government programs designed to never end that act as social welfare.  In the USA, that’s basically Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security (they didn’t start Social Security but they sure as fuck amped it up).  Now, you might believe these are good things.  Perhaps you lean socialist/statist.  Cool.  Good on you.  It isn’t the programs themselves that make them Generation Shit it’s how they funded them: by not.

aka Generation IUD

All they did was borrow, borrow, borrow.  They took all the money the immediate generation of workers were putting in to Social Security – which was sold to them all as kind of a government insured/sponsored retirement fund – and gave it to the previous generation (THE GREATEST GENERATION!) who never really paid into it.  My grandmother, bless her, has been getting social security benefits for longer than I’ve been alive and she sure as shit didn’t pay her fair share; not even a fraction of what she’s taken out.

And all was well for a while.  As long as there were more workers contributing, the little Ponzi scheme could continue.  It was a problem you could literally fuck your way out of.  But: then they stopped fucking.  I have one brother.  That’s enough.  But previous generations were the sort that had 5, 10, who knows how many kids.  So many that I’m pretty sure after a while women didn’t even realize they were giving birth they were so used to it.  You fuck like that, you can create more workers, and so on.  But kids are work, and take up money, so Generation Shit stopped fucking for kids and just fucked for the sake of fucking.  They had a kid or two, felt good about it, and then went on a bunch of vacations all the time after retiring after THIRTY WHOLE YEARS of working.  “Shit, I’m in my 50s, that’s long enough.”  Fuck you, everyone else worked until they died and I will too.

(Though I do like me some good fucking for fucking’s sake and won’t totally begrudge them that one.)

aka Generation Debt

Now, Generation Shit is getting ready to retire and go on benefits and all that.  And they all look around and say, “Fuck, we deserve it.  We paid into this forever.  It’s our turn now.”  Don’t blame them, except: YOU FUCKERS GAVE AWAY ALL “YOUR” MONEY ALREADY!  And you didn’t fuck enough for my generation to support you and us at the same time.  And that’s where the borrowing comes into play.  Borrow this and that and a billion here and a billion there and raise this debt ceiling and that one, and knock out a wall over there to let in more debt.  All this debt really livens up the front room, don’t you think? Macaulay Culkin’s parents were better with money.

And they don’t give a shit because they’ll be dead by the time it comes to pay the piper.  This one little generation of assholes, the self-righteous fucks that they are, forever fucked me in my ass.  In a bad way.  They got to feel good about themselves for helping everyone from the previous generation and then live off the next one.  They used their money to help their parents and used my credit card to help themselves.

Now, my credit is fucked and I can’t do the same to the next generation because my card is maxed out.

Instead of being responsible and having the necessary debate of “look, we want this, but to pay for it, we’re going to have to raise taxes or find some other form of revenue” they just ignored it all.  They got their life of whatever they wanted, never had to feel guilty, and then die leaving people like me to figure out how to fix all this.  And I’m a fucking moron.  I can’t fix this shit.  My generation will probably have to raise taxes super high on everyone (there aren’t enough rich people, to be honest), which won’t be good, or cut back a lot on benefits.  Either way, we’re gonna not have it as good as they did because we’ll spend forever working off what they spent.

My generation doesn’t even get to have the Big Boy Debate.  Our debate is:

“OK. We’re up to our necks in shit that the dead people shat all over.  How do we fix THAT mess?”

“But, what about our future?”

“Oh, Jim, don’t you know: we don’t have one.”

It’s not like they really won any cool wars or anything either.  Just a bunch of irresponsible hippies doing whatever they want and never having to grow up.

aka Generation Chicago Bean

Until the system collapses on itself (and it will) it’s a great trick.  Here in Chicago, destroying the future for your own immediate gain is an art form.  One of the city’s numerous Mayor Daleys was the fucking Picasso of robbing Peter’s Children to pay for monuments to a guy named Paul who donated to his campaign.  He sold this and that, auctioned off these things and those, borrowed money in the form of bonds, all kinds of things, so he could build a fancy park with a fucking bean in it. He once tore down an airport for the reason that his wife didn’t like it.  I’m not kidding.  And now he’s gone because he’s old and that happens.  He can tell everyone, “Well, look what I did!  I made beautiful parks, and had cool events, and we paid people and didn’t even have to raise your taxes!”

Ooops, sorry to the next five mayors who won’t have any revenue because he already spent it.  You’ll have to live with being failures to the public. Lest you think this is an exaggeration, let The Chicago Tribune – a real newspaper – tell you just a little bit about how Chicago works:

Ten years after it opened, Millennium Park stands not only as the crown jewel of downtown Chicago, but emblematic of how Richard M. Daley got things done as mayor.

The story behind its construction involved Daley’s vision for the city, the well-heeled philanthropists who backed him, mayoral friends who benefited financially and people going to prison. And it was built with money the city didn’t have, leaving a debt that lingers today.

In the end, Daley’s relatively modest proposal to commemorate the millennium with a new park that was mostly open green space for $150 million “at no cost to taxpayers” resulted in a world-renowned, multifaceted destination completed in 2004 with a price tag that eventually topped $490 million, including at least $95 million in tax money. The rest of the tab was covered with $225 million in private donations, some cash from parking fees and the eventual sale of four city and Chicago Park District parking garages for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Once it was built, the city found it did not even have enough money to operate the park, despite help from the private sector, so Daley borrowed nearly $30 million just to keep it running — loans taxpayers continue to pay back.

That’s not the only ongoing financial burden related to Millennium Park, which officially opened 10 years ago Wednesday. Taxpayers also could be on the hook for $58 million related to the lease of those parking garages because of how the Daley administration put together the deal.

And this will happen at the state level, the federal level, internationally, and so on.  “China will own everyone” is horse shit because they need us to be economically strong because you can’t squeeze blood from a stone or collect a debt from a guy who drinks a fifth of vodka every night because he hates himself. I guess we can feel good that China gets fucked in all this at least.  I know that gambling is a BIG thing in the Chinese culture (such as you can claim there’s a single culture for a billion+ people).  So, they gambled on buying our debt.  Sorry, the house always wins.  Except this house has no ceiling (debt ceiling callback joke) and we’re all covered in shit because somehow they managed to replace the rain in clouds with little droplets of turds.  You want equality?  It’s coming.  We’re all gonna be in the dirt but we’ll all be in it together.

Actually, fuck The Greatest Generation too.  You raised these little buttholes.  You’re also at fault.  Fuck The Greatest Generation.  Fuck the Baby Boomers.  Fuck Generation X who did fuck all.  Fuck kids wondering why it’s not OK to randomly send dick pics to people.  Fuck you, mom and dad.

And fuck you too, grandma.