by Paul Brammer (News & Opinion Editor)
It may surprise some of you to learn that I am a studious student type at this learning place. I started out as a Major in Gangster Rap Studies, but the department head said that I’m such a bad-arse gangster rudeboy that I was making everyone else look bad, so I stepped aside and took up a degree in History.
In the course of my History degree, I’ve learnt lots of interesting things – for example, in one of our classes we just learned that Jesus was black. And here I was, imagining some skinny white guy trying to convince a bunch of swarthy Arabs that he was the son of dog. Sorry, God.
But I digress – in fact, I don’t digress. Well, I do, but consciously. I rarely digress accidentally, but instead take you on these twisty, windy turns to nowhere on porpoise. And purpose.
And it’s all because I need to fill my word count. It’s terrible, isn’t it? But it is what it is – I need cocaine. Sweet, sweet cocaine. And the only way to get my (sweet, sweet) cocaine is to turn this mangled, squishy brain into thoughts I can think onto paper, so you can take those thoughts and mash them into your eyes. From there you will squeeze those eye-words into your brain, where you can find some room for them right next to that porno you filed away for the next long night alone.
Anyway, I should probably get to my point; Lord knows I should have a point. Our fledgling generation is occupying a very strange space in time. We’re a generation which has been promised the world – we’ve got all the shiny gadgets and doohickeys we want, our education systems allow us to get degrees (which will mean nothing because every single other person in the world has a degree now), and we’ve got the keys to the future locked up in our brains like some torture scene in one of the Saw movies. In short, we’ve got it made.
Only we haven’t. We’re curiously suspended in time, rocking back and forth on our haunches, the ghost outside of the shell. We’re out getting our educations, planning for our careers, our trophy husbands/wives, our snivelling, little, shit children and the looming possibility of global meltdown for a whole host of reasons. Fossil fuel, anyone? Do help yourself.
You know why we’re suspended in time? The bloody baby-boomers. Yeah, those guys. They came along, right after World War Two, and proceeded to stink up the place: they catalysed ground-breaking social changes which we take for semi-granted; they were the vanguard of the new world after the horrors of two devastating conflicts in one generation; they saw rock and roll, Kennedy (including his brains all over Dealey Plaza), the fall of the Soviet Union, etc, etc. They’ve been through all this, but somehow it doesn’t matter to us young ‘uns. We just want a freaking job.
None of us can get any good jobs because those bloody baby boomers are taking up all the workplace. Our entire generation is like buzzards circling round the body of a wandering vagrant who refuses to keel over and die. Every time he keels to one side we prepare ourselves to peck at his eyes and eat his distended belly, but the bastard always rights himself and totters on, uncomprehending of the starving animals hovering over his bonce. Until then, we just have to keep circling, and some of us are getting bloody hungry up here.
Once the baby boomers do start retiring in large numbers, there’s going to be one hell of a void in the job market, and hopefully us young whippersnappers can peck at some eyeballs and fight over tasty entrails. It’s going to be an interesting time, undoubtedly – all of us pissing and moaning about having no jobs are suddenly going to be faced with a yawning chasm in the workplace which we’re going to have to fill. Once presented with that which we’ve moaned and moaned about, how will we handle it?
Will the Prime Minister of our generation appoint a Minister of Skinny Jeans? Will we substitute the United Nations councils for Facebook pages? “OMFG, genocide in Rwanda. Totally not LMFAO”, “Trade sanctions against N Korea – the U.S. likes this”, “Great Britain has joined the group ‘let’s bomb the life out of another Arab country,’ started by Halliburton.”
What will be the major technological innovation of our generation? An iPhone application which is another iPhone – the iParadox?
You know what, those jammy-bastard baby boomers will probably find the Fountain of Eternal Youth the day before we all get those sweet jobs, and they’ll hang on to them for eternity. We’ll be forced to take up jobs chewing pieces of broken glass for the entertainment of our newly immortal masters, before they cast us out of society altogether like common circus freaks.
Our only option will be armed insurrection. However, we’d be crap at violent revolution – our frontline troops would be texting every five minutes and uploading photographs of slain enemies to our friends, “LOL, this guy has 2 kidz @ home! Long w8 4 daddy!” In the process of updating our status (“Corey is pinned down by heavy machine-gun fire”) we’d get our bastard heads blown off (“Corey is newly deceased – 17 people like this”) and the baby boomers would finally and literally fulfil their alliterative title.
