Posts Tagged ‘Millenials’

50% Under 30 Living at Home in #America

Posted: February 17, 2024 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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Is there a difference between societal norms and cultural norms?

Have either of those changed in the past generation (20 years)?

How about the past half century?

Living at home with one’s parents into adulthood used to be akin to the scarlet letter. At least for men. A forehead tattoo with a capital L for the child, and there parents.

Go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, die…

Millennials and Gen Z went to school, more than any other generation in history. Millennials and Gen Z got jobs. Yet more of us are living at home with our parents than ever before.

Nearly half of adults under 30? That’s a lot of lazy freeloaders. Or is it something else?

Are the most educated generations of men and women in history failing the system or is the system failing them? Are they failing society or is society failing them? Are they failing culture or is culture failing them?

Wages hadn’t kept up with productivity for half a century before the pandemic and the historic aftershocks of inflation. How many mind fucks can developing brains take before they’re permanently fried?

Both my parents are dead, so I’m happy to hear so many people 18-29 have living parents that they can live with. But I have a feeling they would rather leave the nest if they didn’t have to choose between rent and eating.

An upside to living at home is that it gives more time for organizing.

The empirical data on this issue seems to keep moving in one direction. Capitalist bootlickers will gaslight and deny saying that unemployment and the stock market are doing better than ever. As if either of those things has anything to do with suffering and quality of life for actual human beings.

Every year, every election cycle, every generation the rank and file seem to be asked to take less, do more, have less, save more, enjoy less, suffer more, think less, feel less, be less so that those with the most can have that much more.

Is this sustainable? Is this ethical? Is this tolerable? Is this how it’s always been? Is this how it will always be?

#Manning Finally Set for Freedom

Posted: January 31, 2017 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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By @anarchyroll

What do you call a transgender person in the military who provides Wikileaks with access to one of the largest data collections of the US military to ever be made public?

Her name is Chelsea Manning. When she first made world-wide headlines she was known as Bradley Manning. A person at the center of one of the biggest news stories of all time. Manning will finally walk out of military prison this spring. Barack Obama commuted the sentence on one of his final days in office.

There is something about giving up ones freedom to expose not simply the truth, but the hidden truth. The hidden truth that has been hidden purposefully. The hidden truth that has been hidden purposefully by people in positions of power and authority.

We all see injustice in our lives. Living life means to witness injustice. There is so much good in the world, but there is also a lot of bad. To stare the good in face and actually do something about it is commendable. To do something knowing there will be a negative personal consequence is admirable. When those consequences are solitary confinement in military prison, well, now we’re talking about a whole new level.

Cowardice is the standard in the developed world. Bravery is showcased in clothing choices and mate selection. Passive aggressive no longer aptly fits the abeyant nature of the modern condition.

Many were too scared to even look at some of the video material Manning leaked. Many more don’t have the conviction to read much of the other material manning leaked that shows the true nature and motives of modern warfare. It makes sense that many of those same people would reflect their self-hatred for those failures of character onto someone who has them in spades and is one of those millennial cross dressers to boot.

There are many people who don’t even want to look another person in the eye on the bus, at the coffee shop, or waiting in line at the grocery store. Are people like that going to stare down solitary confinement in a military prison in the face, and still take action to serve the greater good in the face of being called a traitor by their government and fellow (hu)man?

We accept many wrongs as the norm. Chelsea Manning refused to do this. The price for consent or defiance of these norms is the same, freedom. The norm is to accept our gender whether we are congruent with it or not. The norm is to accept what the Military Industrial Complex does regardless of cost or collateral damage. Both of these norms are very powerful and entrenched.

Just as passive aggressive is no longer a suitable term for confrontation in the modern condition, brave is not a suitable term for what Chelsea Manning has done for the global village. A living, breathing dark knight. Hated and maligned for being very ordinary yet willing to do the extraordinary without care for the personal cost she must pay and has paid.

Not a martyr, a harbinger. A symbol of the future. A future where we don’t accept or stay silent about what is wrong regardless of perceived norms. A symbol of hope. Hope for every confused coward that walks through life in a daze that they can tangibly change themselves and the world. An icon of the millennial generation that desperately needs heroes of substance over style.