When Passing the Torch is a Dumpster Fire

Sweet Ohio Skibidi Rizz!* This is the phrase I have threatened to use in front of my tweenager’s friends if she keeps taking my favorite socks. If you, like me, don’t know what that means, I think it’s time to talk about the true meaning of aging gracefully and why we’re worried about passing the torch.

The more I think about it, the more I think that “aging gracefully” wasn’t about telling women to put a bag over their faces once they reach 37, but about aging with the humility and courage not to fall into sub-psychotic rage every time you’re confronted with something new.

Aging gracefully means passing the torch, and we haven’t been doing that.

Nostalgia: Sweet Dreams Are Made of….

They say nostalgia in movies and fashion arrives about 30 years or so after the original trend, because that’s usually when people who grew up with that fashion get in charge of stuff. Well, I hit the mark.

I turned 42 last week, and my kid is stealing my band T-Shirts. Nostalgia wins. But even as the fashions look the same, the culture is different. Sometime over the last year I’ve found myself being completely baffled by Gen Alpha/Z-Alpha slang, and I’m just going to start crying if another student tells me they want to be a YouTuber. I think this, along with potentially perimenopausal brain fog are the first signs I’m getting old.

The second sign was on remarking to my students who seemed ridiculously unprepared for our discussion on nuclear non-proliferation that “I’ve got more years behind me than in front, this is quickly going to be a You problem because I’m out.”  But my problem is that they don’t seem to care about their problem. They’re underprepared, lacking in media literacy skills, and pretty hopeless about solving the problems they’re going to face. They’ve pre-resigned to what they see as a bleak future and don’t appear to have the resilience to bounce back.

“American Idiot…Where everything isn’t meant to be ok”

I still remember the exact intersection I was driving through when I first heard Green Day’s “American Idiot.” It was the post-9/11 song I needed when it felt like rock and roll had died. I drove to the nearest Best Buy and bought the CD. The lyrics are still pretty solid: everything isn’t meant to be ok, the new media, the alienation, the mindf*ck, and the new kind of tension.

We’re reaping the fruits that we have sown from a generation and a half in the post-9/11 American security state, and it shows. Everything isn’t meant to be ok. Politicians have long stoked our fear and anger (I co-wrote a whole article about it) to keep their jobs without having to do any work. And over and over, the party that loses will look for whom to blame, which comes back to telling half of Americans to hate the other half for ruining their hopes and dreams. I wish George Carlin were still alive.

The continual nostalgia for a “mythic past” that drives both fascism and US discourse keeps opinion writers in business on varying themes of why Americans are angry now, where bipartisanship has gone, and how conservatives feel left out—without any evidence that these are unique social trends. Writers have talked about conservative Americans feel like “strangers in their own lands,” David Brooks continues to churn out columns trying to explain the two different worlds in America even while he doesn’t seems to understand a single one (seriously The Atlantic, you hired a guy who’s surprised the Ivy League was constructed to maintain inequality?).

I think a lot of it has to do with fear of losing control. Boomers and Gen X, and increasingly Millennials, are getting to a point where the world isn’t theirs/ours. The slang, the styles, the movies, and the future belong to someone else. That doesn’t mean we should sit back as idle viewers, but it does mean we should approach change with openness and not try to force the country on an impossible backwards trajectory. The far-right coercion culture is a prime example of this: going back to a white, evangelical, gendered America that exists only in their imaginations. It was their world, and they want it back even if it only ever existed in black and white TV shows.

Passing the Torch could be a dumpster fire

As someone who has kids, I have a vested interest in the world not going entirely to hell. I want to understand changes and be fluid in my judgements, but when I see young people voting to relive history’s stupidest hits, I’m not encouraged. But it’s going to be Gen Z’s world, and part of the reason they are so angry is that we’ve done a lousy job of making that world a good one. The cost of living is impossible, the planet is actually dying, and we have laid so little intellectual groundwork that the generation which lives entirely online has no sense of digital literacy and can’t or won’t avoid misinformation campaigns.

At the moment, democrats are blaming Gen Z for voting for Trump, in a reversal of the idea that young people are more liberal. There’s lots of political pearl clutching  about it, and a shock that comes from the fact that none of these pollsters have spent much time around Gen Z.

Gen Z women aren’t defining themselves by their proximity to men, and that’s angering a lot of older people who transfer this rage to young men. Unfortunately, that angry narrative has found home with many Gen Z men, making women pull even farther away from them, and reinforcing that one of the biggest conflicts in this new world order is going to be along gender lines. We managed to pass the torch to the women and the emotional baggage to the men.

Trump is rubbish on the priorities Gen Z said they value: global climate change, jobs, wages, civil liberties. So, why did so many vote for him? Gen Z men said they felt ignored by Harris, which is something I’ve heard from a lot of young men about democratic candidates. And I do actually feel bad for how our society neglects and propagandizes men; there’s a lot to be said on how we can support young men, but as long as they’re self-radicalizing online they’re going to continue to forego that torch in favor of their fathers’ hysteria.

There’s plenty of work to do and ways we can help shape a world that’s not ours, but speaking as a cranky middle-age lady: It's also hard to want to pass a torch to a generation where half of them were willing to take US democracy down just because they don’t think they got enough pats on the head.