They don’t know. They’re just mindless dullards, parroting the crap the media feeds them. They don’t want to be educated, informed, aware. They don’t want to be challenged or liberated or inspired.
They cling to their prejudices and bigotries and fact-free world-views like drowning men to straws. They like the cages the Trump’s and Farage’s have erected around their minds. Fortunately, they have no power, no influence and even less use. They are spent, shackled and blind. It’s over for them and the next generation can now have a go. They can surely do no worse.
Yes, Generation Snowflake. Every generation in history has disparaged the one that followed it. Yet, ironically, it’s us; generation X, my generation, who screwed it up and bottled it. We scabbed, laid down, got bought off and let the Tories ruin it for our kids and then let Blair finish the job. And those of us who resisted? Who fought? At Orgreave, at Wapping, in Trafalgar Square. Who managed, at least, to see off the Poll Tax? Ultimately, we failed. We won the odd defensive battle, sure, but we lost the war. We were beaten. Thatcher won on an even bigger scale than she ever lived to see.
Breathtaking cheek, really, slagging off the kids; after we pissed away, through greed and selfishness and cowardice and apathy, the legacy of the post-war rebuilders; to pass on barely scraps to our kids and then demean them as snowflakes. To belittle the generation we have failed so badly; to spawn the first generation in a hundred years to be worse off than the one it followed. That’s our legacy.
So you hollow men, pushing fifty like me, cradling your pints and your defeatism and your new-found love for UKIP, you keep on sneering at the kids. Sure, they’ve got their safe spaces, their identity politics and their piss-weak grasp, if at all, of class. At the moment… but that deserves only scorn, right? When compared to the rape-cults, the travesties of Leninism and black-comedy Bolshevism we built. Then destroyed.
And you born-again lefty-haters? Working-class UKIPers? Raging at the ‘remoaners’, the opposition to Trump, insisting people should ‘shut up’ ‘respect democracy’ and ‘accept it’? You should all lose your incomes and your homes and be forced to clean the piss from the workhouse floor and the shit from the Squire’s stables; while your kids are yanked from school and chased up chimneys. Because that’s what the world looked like when we ‘accepted’ the consensus; ‘respected’ the established order. Like you say we should now.
And you folks aren’t hypocrites, are you? It must be agony for you to sit there and enjoy the freedoms and rights previous generations achieved through protest, often violent, and paid for with their very lives. You hate that shit, don’t you? So it’s only fair that you don’t get to enjoy those things while condemning the methods that won them for you. We squandered the post-war settlement and now drip scorn and derision on the kids we failed.
You disgust me.
Harry Paterson
