Everyone’s screaming about how bad everything is, as if now is some special time in history when things are particularly bad.

You know, as oppossed to that time when everything was good.

But I find myself wondering whether things are actually worse or if we’re just more aware of the bad stuff happening all around us.

And so I revisit Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and feel utter shock at the scary parallels between Joan’s trip to San Francisco in the late-1960s to find three generations—The Greatest, The Silent, and The Baby Boomers—in various states of awful flux.

Slouching takes its somewhat eponymous title from the William Butler Yeats Poem The Second Coming, which, in the following lines states: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

What rough beast indeed.

But the foreboding in her essay from that self-same titled book extends further.

Joan wrote about lost parents, abandoned children, a fear like suffocating humidity that hung in the latter 1960s while the Viet Nam war raged, and the hippies traded social and familial responsibility for the “freedom” to binge on sex, drugs, and shiftlessness … while their parents worried themselves sick bailing them out of one jam after another and their children went on to be the neglected, abused, molested—ultimately independent—yet eternally fractured adults of Generation X.

We, the grandchildren of the Greatest Generation, had less religion, fewer rules, and no supervision.

And it showed.

We turned to grunge music and self-harm. We grew a thick skin to protect our sad soft underbelly.

Our mantra was hopelessness, pointlessness, and rage.

Which may have been fine if we had had a war to go to or some great social injustice to correct. But I don’t remember us getting all that excited over anything because “Who gives a shit? That’s why.”

We had rates of panic and anxiety rivaling soldiers returning from war.

So, when we grew up, we tried to create a world where our children would never have to be alone or afraid or hopeless.

But overcorrecting rarely yields the desired result.

In Yeats’s poem he talks of a second coming.

And now, some sixty years after the highwater mark of hippiedom’s toxic transformation of American society, we have that second coming …

… and a third …

… and a fourth.

But there are no Christs among us.

Only the beasts of our own making.

Yeats writes, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

In modern parlance, one must seek a different kind of poet.

How fitting that a hundred years after Gertrude Stein’s garage manager coined the phrase “Lost Generation” while admonishing the auto mechanic who’d given her shoddy service, we’re staring down the long, warped neck of the whiskey bottle at another lost generation.

Only it isn’t a single generation but several.

During the denouement of the classic movie Back To The Future, Marty asks, “What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?” to which Doc Brown responds, “It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids.”

Something’s got to be done about our kids.

And their kids.

And their kids’ kids.

Study after study shows the generations post-X are the least educated, the most unhappy, the least financially stable, and the most dependent.

Or, as Aaron Sorkin’s Will McAvoy would say, “The worst period generation period ever period.”

But, as much as the old love bagging on the young and the young enjoy blaming all their problems on the old, the truth is … the kids didn’t get that way on their own.

And they aren’t the only ones in need of fixing.

Maybe every generation is just a different kind of terrible.

I don’t know.

What I do know is, there are so many bad things occurring today that didn’t happen when I was a kid, something has gone seriously wrong.

And it only seems to be getting worse.

As bad as things might have been when I was growing up, I never worried about being shot while watching a movie in a theater or while attending church or shopping for groceries.

I didn’t fret over mask mandates and quarantines, and—while robots were stealing many of the good jobs—I didn’t have to contend with the impending digital locust plague known as artificial intelligence.

In addition to a rash of new and worsening social and emotional issues among younger generations, literacy rates—for nearly all ages—are at all-time lows.

In Slouching, Joan writes of the troubled youth of 1969, “Their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes…. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”

How can one master the language when thoughts are expressed via gifs and memes, and your lexicon consists of cartoon eggplants, skulls, and smiley faces?

Rather than continually proclaiming new levels of sheer insanity and gapingly obvious toxicity and dysfunction as TheNewNormal™ … we should recognize that the beast is no longer slouching towards—but has set up shop—in downtown Bethlehem.

And it’s fucking shit up old school.

Apparently, even being engulfed in flames isn’t enough to get our attention because, nowadays, we only seem to notice when we’re truly shocked.

A scale with extremely low bars and seemingly bottomless pans.

Social media has inured us to horror, to impropriety, to vulgarity, to shameless self-aggrandizement, to gross pandering.

I mean, if you’re going to cry, why not do it on camera for the whole world to see?

Arguing with your spouse? Hit record!

Experience even the slightest inconveneince—make them famous!

I have a pretty vivid imagination, and I don’t think I could shock you if I wanted to.

Not by being loud or messy.

Not with violence.

Not with debauchery.

Not even with apathy.

Shock has developed a sort of half-life. Like cobalt. Its rate incalculable.

What yesterday drew cries of foul today elicits yawns.

The newsman says, “Seven people dead,” and all I can think is: you call that a mass shooting!?

Why?

The usual list of antisocial behaviors—which may be the only thing that actually seems to piss people off.

The last thing the debased and debauched want to hear is how their do-anything-anywhere-anytime-at-any-cost lifestyles have destroyed all the good things that made America the place everyone wanted to be.

They’ll tell you that such good times never existed.

They’ll assure you that broken homes are just as viable as intact ones.

They have a long list of vile names to call you when you challenge their selfish, shortsighted, toxic dogma—right and left.

I mean, who doesn’t want to skip the hard work and go straight to dessert?

But this Late-Roman Living hasn’t done us any favors.

We can burn cities to the ground in protest but we can’t be bothered to attend a city council meeting.

We’ve lost what Cormac McCarthy called “mercantile ethics” or the basic humility and politeness necessary to a workable society.

As a latchkey child of CBS, PBS, and NBC, my education was not Socrates or Aristotle but Mr. Rogers, Jim Henson, Huey Lewis and Ivan Reitman.

Everything I know about classical music I learned from Bugs Bunny.

Before you roll your eyes and exclaim, “Here comes the lecture,” know this … we need to be lectured.

All of us.

Fuck that.

We need to be screamed at.

We need someone shaking our shoulders and shouting in our faces, “You fucked it all up! And if you don’t do something drastic and soon, things are only going to get worse!”

Which they always can.

Because, here’s a dirty little secret: rock bottom has no bottom.

I love people who justify the decline and decay with that tired old trope about how times are always bad and that those who point it out are somehow deficient.

Yes, times are always bad.

But there are degrees of awful.

And right now, shit’s really fucking awful.

This isn’t about religion or politics or who’s to blame—we’re all culpable to a certain degree, either by active involvement or hands-off negligence.

This is about disengaging from our sociopolitical street gangs and seeing each other for what we are: flawed people trying to get by.

It doesn’t take a Harry Seldon to recognize a Seldon Crisis … and we’re currently in the second trimester of a doomed pregnancy.

Neither am I advocating getting angry.

I fear we took the advice of Howard Beale in the film Network a little too literally and far too shallowly when he told people to go outside and shout, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Because that’s as far as we progressed.

300 million people screaming in the streets.

Of course, we’re not screaming “read more books!” or “treat each other with respect!”

We’re screaming “look at me!” and “this person is to blame for all your problems, so let’s ruin their life!”

Reality remains the same.

It’s the expectation that’s changed.

If you look at The American Dream as a winning lottery ticket, then you’re bound to be disappointed.

I disagree with those who call it a myth.

Just like prayer isn’t meant to be God’s own Instacart, The American Dream was merely a set of principles that said you have the opportunity to do something great.

You may very well fail.

And miserably.

But you might also wildly succeed.

That promise of a chance to work hard and play by the rules got twisted into a crying towel for those who wanted everything handed to them.

They invented all sorts of isms and injustices and socioeconomic boogiemen to justify their sloth, their greed, and their disdain for the very flag that shielded them—in writing—from evils in the flesh faced by so many billions the world over.

But, when you’ve enjoyed such freedoms your whole life, it’s easy to become spoiled.

It’s easier still to believe the honeyed memes of those who wish to destroy it.

Especially when they walk, talk, and look just like us.

We’ve come up with a million wrong ways to fix our problems but refuse to stop and look at the basic causes.

Everywhere I look I see broken people.

Broken in different ways from generations previous.

I don’t know of any easy solutions.

But I know the answer is not doing nothing.

A problem that took fifty or sixty years to create can’t be fixed overnight.

And the fact is that most of American society’s problems stem from bad parenting.

Hold your howls a moment and try to think of a major concern that doesn’t stem in adulthood from the child having been mistreated or ignored.

Dysfunctional adults generally sprang up from dysfunctional children.

And dysfunctional children aren’t born that way.

Sorry, Hippies, but this one’s on you.

We’ve moved away from shame, blame, and judgment to anything goes.

Anything goes isn’t just making us terribly unhappy, it’s killing us.

Giving kids boundaries and expectations and consequences shouldn’t be a left-right issue.

It’s just common sense.

Or at least it used to be.

Children now more than ever have become pawns in the ideological game of checkers between our two-party madhouse.

I hold no allegiance to either political party.

In sections of both sides, I see some admirable qualities and I see the gleam in the eye for crazed violence and an itch for destruction.

Peace and tranquility are my faction, mankind my tribe, and facing this shit-nado which we currently endure is my only concern.

If, as a society, we’re going to make any of this work, we—all of us—are going to have to relearn patience on some as-yet-unheard-of new level.

Not patience for bad behavior.

We’ve had too much of that.

But patience for those who disagree with us.

We can work together without agreeing on everything.

We can vote for different scumbags and still be nice to each other.

We can allow each other to express rival opinions without seeking to socially and financially destroy one another.

I’m not pining for the good old days.

I’m looking forward to some good old tomorrows.

But we’re not going to fix our problems at the ballot box.

Haven’t we figured that out by now?

You wanna make America healthy, wealthy, and wise again?

Let’s start with the basics:

• Go clean your house
• Stop littering
• Don’t get high in public
• Spend time with your kids
• Get off your phone
• Volunteer in town
• Stop having kids you can’t afford
• Go to a school board meeting
• Go to a city council meeting
• Write a letter to an estranged friend or family member
• Visit a loved one
• Read a book
• Read a hundred books
• Eat healthier
• Stop expecting politicians to fix your troubles—they can’t and won’t
• Stop blaming everyone else for your problems
• Stop complaining so goddamn much!

Whatever you do, think before you act.

I’ll wind this down by paraphrasing Johnathan Franzen who said something like, “You can’t save the world, but you can be kind to whatever’s right in front of you.”

Not performative kindness.

Not kindness only for those who agree with you.

Not telling someone “You got this!” when they clearly don’t.

Not giving a handout to someone who refuses to do their fair share.

Real kindness.

The kind we so sorely seem to be lacking.

The kind that slays rough beasts—wherever they may slouch.