I'm Starting A Generation War With Your Parents.

A very dear friend wrote this to me in an email this week after I shared a very pressing issue and trying circumstance in my life

Maybe one day i will be in a place where i'll know what people are thinking when they cast young people aside without reason, and maybe i will be able to stop it from happening. It's like young [people] are expendable in their eyes, or they don't need to be mentored or critiqued, or they're young so they'll just bounce back, or it was never their thing to begin with.

Without knowing anything more you understand now that I myself have recently been "cast aside" to quote my friend or, as I like to put it in the words of my favorite band, "Trampled Underfoot". And what I am realizing more and more these last weeks is that if you're like me, and find yourself 35 years(ish) old or younger, we're in a bad place my friend.

A very, very bad place.

If you are in this particular demographic, you are in what I consider the greatest generation ever to have walked the earth. What makes us great? I'll tell you. We were born Princes and Princesses of this western world. We inherited a world our grandparents built with their bare hands. They fought off one of the greatest evils in history and returned to make a world so full of comforts and safety that it now seems invincible.

But it's not.

The life that we live, the lives our parents and grandparents built for us is not invincible. This world of western ideals and principles is being brought down not by those who built it, but by the next generation that inhabited it. These "baby boomers" are what puts my generation in a very, very bad place. They're also the generation that will make us great.

At Woodstock, the Baby Boomers declared their freedom from the previous generation as all generations do. Vowing to build a world based on peace and understanding ,they embraced social liberalism and flower power at a young age. When they all left their hippy state and got jobs, they all voted for low taxes and a small state and favored "as much for myself as I can" individualism. Then, upon the realization of their impending mortality, up goes spending on healthcare and pension. As one economics pundit puts it "Perhaps we are seeing the scary sight of a generation that has been rather brutal in getting its own way sqeezing everything it can out of it's children."*

I feel a great affinity for our grandparents generation. They fought against the great injustice of their time and built for themselves a world that suited them. It earned them the oft used title "greatest generation".

Likewise, will we do the same. We won't sail to the battlefields of Europe to do so though. Like Tyler Durden said, our Great War is a Spiritual War. The great injustice that you and I will fight against in our lifetime is the lifetime that came before us. One bent on selfishness and greed, gratification and self imposed piety and self righteousness. Our weapon will be our philosophy. We are the post modern generation so feared and often warned of in the halls of politics and sanctuaries of Religion. We have no regard for absolutes, we trample on the hard and fast and tread lightly in the midst of those who declare posession of the only Truth.

The world that the previous generation built was one built on absolutes, black and whites and hard and fasts. The previous world scorned our creativity and spurned our worldview.

In answer to my friend's email then, the reason for the older generation casting aside it's younger counterparts is often times an issue of self preservation. Forgive me for believing this slightly more than halfheartedly but it's little less than a conspiracy by the middle aged against the young.

So stake your claim now you who have become apathetic, fat and lazy in your offices and suburbs and mini vans. Your claim will not be yours much longer. For all your institutions will be torn down. This world and this lifestyle you've grown accustomed to will cease to exist. Your inefficient houses of parliament, your gluttonous social programs and most of all, your irrelevant churches will rot away and be swept aside. The truths you claim to hold and vaunt over all the earth will be revealed as the empty skeletons that they are. It will not be a violent revolution. It will happen gradually. We will simply wait for your ideals, thoughts and lifestyle to pass away. Your politics will erode and evolve and your wars will end. And, thank heaven and earth, your churches will wither and shrink. Your monuments and edifices to a God whose message you've long forsaken will crack and fade and the "Truth" you've told everyone you have a monopoly on will be laughed at and scorned by the homeless you've turned away and the widows you've let fend for themselves.

This generation promised us the Truth. I spit on your truth. I scorn the ideals and principles on which this lifestyle is based. And I will live my life in a manner that reflects the one who tore it down two thousand years ago and showed the world how it could be, how it ought to be.

It's dying. All of it is in its death throes. There's no cure and there's no going back. Have you noticed it? Have you woken up one sunny morning with the morning light beginning it's slow crawl across your bed and thought that it will all be over, and very soon?

Soon and very soon. The trigger will be pulled.

And you will be the shooter.

*Faisal Islam