Grandma’s White Glove
It all seems so simple on the face of it: you’re Gen-X and the issue of tolerance was part of your social consciousness, and yet here you are in the land that tolerance promised and it’s all just dust. Your grandma is running her white glove over your TV stand, saying “Child, we told your parents their music sucked, their movements sucked, and now look at this mess.”
But you know grandma might have rolled up her sleeves in that factory back in the 40s, but somehow that didn’t actually mean equality, it just meant it’s awful to starve people and beat them and it helps with moral superiority to hail that history. I mean, she’s voting for it now.
She believes in freedom, but make sure you check it because American freedom ain’t what you thought it was. You knew it in the 90s, but here it is in your face and you can’t go to the mall to just hang out and waste time, partly because the mall is closed due to contagion.
We used to joke that we wanted the jetpack we were promised, but then our parents were promised a nuclear death and they didn’t get that, either. What we all got was an AR-15 aimed at our kids and surveillance capitalism. We never dreamed anyone would pay this much attention to us — they didn’t care when we were growing up, but now our every move is tracked and sold and my god, we are being parented in the most abusive governmental industrial complex Foucault could have imagined. I guess he did imagine it, it was just cool to discuss in the classroom at the time.
What in the hell are we going to do, Gen-X? You know we can’t sit here like this anymore. You know that latch key is still hanging around our neck like we live alone, but take a look who has walked in the door behind you.
We know we have to get up and fight, but my god, we feel so old. We feel older than grandma despite never having to go through rations and the depression.
She’s got that glove and she’s looking at us like she dares us to speak up. And we know we have to, but what will we say this late in the game?
