My wife’s dog started barking at 5:30 this morning because he hates me, obviously, so I’ve been up for too long already. Engaging in my usual Sunday morning ritual (doomscrolling with coffee cup in hand) I came across a video of a history professor (or maybe economics I really don’t know) giving a lecture at a world summit of some kind. His talk’s thesis is the economic peak of the United States was 1973. He explains the factors and the people (presidents) responsible for causing the empire’s decline but that is not what stuck out to me.

1973 was the early middle of Generation X (1965-1985 roughly), my generation, which means we were raised by a generation which benefited from and lived in the best possible time to exist in the United States. That also means over the course of our lifetime we have seen it become harder and harder to achieve the economic and social status of our parents.

Harder and harder we tried to achieve the milestones which came more or less automatically to our parents as, over our time on this rock, we witnessed our country and economy fall father and farther into chaos and our country became something our parents found harder to recognize and the economic freedoms they took for granted grew further and further out of our reach.

Still forgotten, first by our parents as they enjoyed the excesses of the 1980’s or worked more and longer hours to survive then by the fact that GenX is sandwiched between the two largest generations (population wise) to ever exist (baby boomers and millennials), we marched slower and slower toward our golden years knowing in the depths of our hearts we may never actually be able to afford to stop working completely and except in rare exceptional circumstances there will be nowhere for us to go and no one to take care of us.

As our aging parents, who had to be reminded daily of our existence by commercials on television, look to us to care for them in the advanced old age and the idiot they (together with millennials ironically enough) voted into office completes the task of destroying our country started by Nixon and pushed into high gear by Reagan, we find ourselves asking the same question we always asked….

The same question our parents asked us more times then could be actually counted….

What the hell is going on around here?

Pushed farther and farther into disenfranchisement as we struggle to achieve the same goals which came so easily to our parents we wonder who is to blame for our inability to find the success we saw all around us when we were children. Surely not us, because we did what we were told to do to become successful. We went to college, we got married and had kids, we worked hard and invested our savings, and over the past ten years especially but over our lifetimes in general, we watched all that we worked for disappear without a trace.

Dreaming of a life without economic worry those who could moved out of cities and onto farms and homesteads, many more left the country which promised to take care of us if we only went to college, got good jobs, and paid our taxes.

Those who couldn’t make such moves worked more jobs and longer hours, desperately trying to a footing in a country, in a world, which for the most part never bothered to notice we were here at all.

all the while wondering….

asking…

and sometimes screaming….

what the hell is going on around here?