Gen La-Z

 I hesitate to indulge in generational nonsense where one story becomes an indictment of an entire cohort of people who number in the tens of millions.

Yet...

The story about Mary Peltola that was published recently is ridiculous. Even worse, it makes me agree with Yglesias, and I hate to do that. Basically, Peltola could lose her temper and shout at people. She also had staffers help with personal chores like feeding her pet chameleon. Some of the things she said were what can be termed "problematic" like using the words retard and fag. You can understand why young staffers fresh from college would find that off-putting and troublesome. 

What I can't understand is why the fuck they went to the press. 

If you have a boss that uses language that you don't like, you can confront them, consult someone else in the organization or quit. House members have chiefs of staff; talk to them if you're afraid of your representative. Tattling to the press over something as fundamentally meaningless - in an election year, where Peltola might hold the key to a critical Senate majority - represents a sense of entitlement that is inexcusable.

There's a lot of memes that circulate along the lines of: "I wake up and work 40 hours a week so that I can afford basic goods like food and shelter. Isn't that fucked up?" There's a sense that somehow our jobs should cater to us. Some of this likely comes from remote work during Covid and the realization that a lot of that 40 (or 60) hour work week feels like wasted time. I get it. We are all the main characters in our own story and it sucks to discover that we are background players - NPCs - in the grand scheme of things.

I do wonder if there isn't at least a little merit in the criticism of education - and college education in particular - that we basically coddle these kids and make them feel like oh so special wonderchildren. Then - when they confront the demands of adulthood - they crumble. I suppose that's why, despite the degraded commercialization of many college and even high school sports - there's still a place for sports. Sometimes you lose and it sucks, even when you prepared hard and did everything right.

The whole bonkers Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar that got backlash for ending their mask mandates on Saturday night is an example of people who cannot brook anything that doesn't cater to their personal whims. The world does not bend to your personal preferences - yet many colleges actually do create these sort of country club experiences with luxury dorms and decked out student unions and health clubs that kids come to expect as their due. That's just unrealistic.

I remember seeing a t-shirt that said "Bring Back Reasonable Bullying." Obviously, no, don't bully. However, we have to end the tripwire sense of "harm" that makes every single inconvenience a hate crime - especially those around language - if we want to have people who can actually live in the world and not their fantasy version.