Changes

I am tired of living through all these major historical events, aren't you?

*Sigh*

I was going to write an article about the various reasons that Russians and Americans are natural allies, but then I stumbled across an awful, awful book that doesn’t need to exist. Fucking boomers, I swear. I kid, I kid (mostly).

No offense to you just because were born between 1946 and 1966, “boomer” is less an age and more of a mindset resultant from being born in a particularly stable environment. I’ve met boomers who are my age! A stable environment bakes in a mindset that extolls the virtues of long-term planning at the expense of immediate adaptability, and while there is nothing wrong with being mindful of the future, it is not natural for people to concern themselves with what is going on ten years in the future when they can’t be certain about what is going to happen tomorrow. When nothing goes according to plan, you end up developing a mindset of “best not waste time planning, then.” The world as we know it is ending, and this slow-motion collapse began right around the time I was born. That’s when things started changing, and the final change, the one that completely overturns the world that the boomers were born into, is only just beginning. What is the American boomers’ greatest fear? If you guessed “that their country is becoming more like Russia,” you know exactly where I’m going like this.

I’ve dropped hints, and some of you may have figured this out by now, but I was born on the 17th of December, 1991, in Saint Petersburg. Already the old system was collapsing; the city had changed its name from Leningrad about two months earlier, and eight days later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Some wanted to save it, but there was no saving it. Gorbachëv did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, what happened next is the reason he remained so hated in his own country until the day he died; Russia in the 1990s was wild, in fact I’ve previously described it as “Mad Max with snow instead of sand.” It was the end of one era, and beginning of another, and though I’m too young to have any memories of life under the Soviet system, my sister was born in 1985, so she does.

Skipping over the chaos of my early life, moving to the US and then bouncing around between New York and two different places in Pennsylvania, the next major historical event of my life was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. This, as many of you reading this may remember, ushered in “the post-9/11 world,” and even though I was only ten at the time, I still remember the censorious nonsense that the Shrub Administration implemented in the name of combatting terrorism. Look, I was a weird kid, I had been homeschooled for three years already, and I had been reading the works of David Hume and Immanuel Kant as early as age eight, so I had a far more extensive grasp of life than the average ten-year-old. It was the first time in my life that there was a major spike in purchases of George Orwell’s 1984. Mad Magazine also ran a cartoon depicting a warning sign at a public library saying “patrons checking out George Orwell’s 1984 may be subjected to a government interrogation disturbingly similar to the one in part 3.” All this is neglecting the ridiculous and ultimately useless security measures implemented at major airports. Some of my friends, on the other hand, are young enough that they don’t remember any of this, as they were born into the post-9/11 world. Those same friends also do not recall an era before the ubiquity of the internet and social media in particular, though many of them wish they did not need to be perpetually “plugged in,” on account of how stressful it is, especially with the way it is integrated into public schools. I’d elaborate, but then you’d be here all day.

Then came the financial collapse of 2008. My family lost close to a million dollars’ worth of investments as a result of that, and considering that all the “expert” financial advice hadn’t served them particularly well, this when my parents started asking me what I thought. Two words: buy gold. The price of gold had been steadily going up for years already, as it was announced every day on the radio. “Sounds like a good investment,” I kept saying, but nobody listened except for my tinfoil hat-wearing uncle, who laughed all the way to the bank… or Malta, in his case. No, seriously, I have a crazy uncle who sold everything he owned, bought a literal pot of gold, and moved to Malta. Was he really that crazy after all?

The boomer world is that of “find good job, work hard, save up, retire and enjoy life.” There was no need to be smart with investments, because everything would always be there, they thought. The post-2008 world was different, and if it wasn’t obvious before that the financial sector was a shell game, now everybody knew, because the shells had been overturned, and the pea was nowhere to be found. Real wealth is in tangible assets, not mutual funds. So yeah, I guess I am rich, since I own land, despite my net worth on paper being less than a tenth that of the typical affluent suburbanite. After all, real estate value is based on location, not the value of the land itself, much less what it can potentially produce. Should the entire system come crashing down and fiat currency becomes completely worthless, I can still feed myself, whereas the author of that awful, awful book cannot.

All of these paradigm shifts, the shift away from the notion of the west being free and the east not, the loss of faith in “the system” to provide prosperity necessitating a return to rugged individualism, and finally, the end of world policing, are all part of the death of the post-WWII world. In addition to the geopolitical situation changing, with Europe openly declaring both America and Russia to be its enemies, the culture is changing. WWII veterans, unlike the veterans of every other war before or since, had been practically deified thanks to a hack named Tom Brokaw. However, now that WWII vets are rapidly going extinct, younger generations are more likely to question the official narrative, to the point where zoomers are more than twice as likely to be Holocaust deniers as members of Generation X, themselves almost twice as likely to be Holocaust deniers as boomers. Though I don’t believe it’s ever acceptable to deny history, the fact that such a shift is happening is welcome, because it means more people are willing to question whether the Axis Powers really were “the bad guys,” and that, perhaps, the reasons for WWII were a little more complex. Whatever the case, geopolitical discourse has been stuck in 1938 for far too long, and now, that’s finally coming to an end. Let’s start comparing modern-day corruption, ambition, and redemption to Ancient Rome, thank you very much!

Nevertheless, the boomer mindset that is stuck in the 20the century, so dismissive of decentralisation, whether on the individual level of subsistence farming in opposition to industrial agriculture, or on the national level of isolationism and multipolarity in opposition to a unified world order, is going to issue a rather loud and dissonant death-rattle. The beast will tell all sorts of lies in order to save itself in the face of anyone willing to approach it to deliver the final blow. Which brings us to that awful, awful book. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until Sunday to find out about it, because this primer was meant as an elaboration of the author’s mindset that can be applied to a number of other people as well. I prefer to keep book reviews short, though I’ll still have to break that rule with this one, and you’ll see why.

Oh, and given that the weather is warming up and there is much to do outside, combined with my return to focusing on my fiction writing, means that these soliloquies will once again be shorter and considerably lower-brow than what you’ve gotten used to if you are a new arrival. Perhaps I may even take hiatus. Na shledanou!