The generations have swapped sides on fussiness
Rob Long
“I just want you to know,” I announced to my father over the dinner table 40 years ago, “that I am a very committed socialist.”
He was quiet for a moment, probably calculating the time between this announcement and the arrival of my first paycheck. That’s often the time committed socialists find themselves on the journey to angry taxpayers.
A pay stub has a very clarifying effect on the young socialist. When you see what you thought you were going to get paid and then what you actually are going to get paid, neatly organized on a piece of card stock, it’s hard not to get curious about what that guy Milton Friedman was all about. The pay stub, I’ve often thought, is probably the most effective direct mail piece in Republican Party history.
I don’t really recall what happened after my father’s restrained silence at the dinner table. Probably nothing, to be honest. I was in the habit of making what I assumed (and hoped) were outrageous and provocative announcements over a meal, and it was my father’s habit to sigh patiently and refrain from asking me to please wait until I had eaten the meal made from food purchased with money gained in the exercise of capitalist enterprise, so my guess is he shrugged and said something like, “Let me know how that works out for you.”
Young people are, traditionally, irritating loudmouths. Young people are the ones making the crazy claims at Thanksgiving, wearing Mao suits and Che tees and Trotskyite facial hair. Young people go vegan and dress weird and ask where the lettuce in the salad came from. Young people, in other words, have been assigned by Providence the task of giving old people heart attacks and strokes, often at the dinner table.
There’s probably an evolutionary biological imperative in there somewhere. The young lions in the jungle prowl around and sulk and wait for the right moment to challenge the old lions to a deadly showdown. The human animal is more subtle, but the goal is the same: Get the old folks out of the way. Where the young lions do it with tooth and claw, the young humans do it with idiotic revolutionary slogans and a tattoo of an Egyptian ankh.
Or, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. For the past few years, though, I’ve been hearing from friends with children that it’s been the other way around.
“Oh my GOD!” a friend’s daughter reportedly shouted at her when she asked a perfectly natural question. She had been informed (probably at the dinner table) that one of her daughter’s new friends was nonbinary and used the pronouns “they” and “them.”
“So, PLEASE, when they come over, DO NOT commit VIOLENCE on them by using the INCORRECT pronoun.”
My friend nodded and took this all in, engaging in the ancient and venerable ritual that my father had engaged in decades before — breathing deeply and entering a peaceful mental landscape and attempting to detach from the body and float above the space.
But then she couldn’t help herself. She was curious — the way a person can be about things that are new and different. So she asked the question that you’re not supposed to ask, and she asked it in exactly the way you’re not supposed to ask it. “So, um,” she began, “are they a boy they or a girl they?”
“Oh my GOD!” was the apoplectic response, and for a moment, she was convinced that she had given her young daughter — her fit, athletic 15-year-old daughter — a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or some other affliction that young people used to give old people. Her eyes were wide, her breathing labored and erratic. Honestly, my friend told me, it looked like a call-911 situation for a moment. In fact, her daughter was reacting exactly the way I secretly hoped my father would react all those years ago, by shouting himself hoarse and raging until he was out of breath. That’s what young people are supposed to make old people do.
These days, though, it’s the young people who have uptight, rigid orthodoxies and an inflexible notion of good manners. It’s the young folks who are on edge, at a constant simmer, nervous wrecks. And it’s the old folks who are the ones causing the aneurysms by using an undesired pronoun or getting the lingo slightly wrong. It’s the same family drama, only in reverse.
The worst part, according to my friend with the easily triggered daughter, was how much fun it was to provoke that overreaction. “After I realized she wasn’t going to die,” she said, “I couldn’t wait to do it again.”
Her daughter needs to learn what my father knew all those years ago. Sometimes it’s best to just let things go.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.