Boomers: Doomed Fuckers and Their Ashtray World

by: E.M. Burlingame

After One Too Many on the Way to the Payday Loan Bar

Alright. Pull up a stool. The whiskey’s cheap and the truth’s cheaper. Look at ‘em. Out there. The white-hairs. The Boomers. Born with a fucking anvil tied to their souls. Right out the chute, doomed. Their old men? The “Greatest Generation”? Jesus Fucking Christ! They walked through hellfire and stomped on the devil’s neck. Saved the fucking world by killing tens of millions and bombing everything else, or so the story goes. Mountains of corpses. Cities and the old world turned to dust. What’s a kid supposed to do with that hanging over his crib? Sing lullabies about Omaha Beach? Oh, hell no.

They couldn’t match their parents’ wartime guts—how do you top storming beaches and bombing cities to ash? And you think you have daddy issues. So they made their own fights. Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, a thousand bush wars and conflicts. Sent their kids and grandkids to murder millions, all to demonstrate how brave they were for sending their own to die. Let's not forget Vietnam, how many of the Boomers greatest died in that bullshit fight? Pointless wars. Blood and sand and oil, kids sent home in bags or with heads full of ghosts, all for nothing but tens of trillions of debts to prop up banks and retirement funds.

So the old world was rubble. Fine. Smashed crockery. They had to glue together their own shitty little dish. And what did they do? Learned early they couldn’t measure up. Who could? Couldn’t fight like daddy did against a real, honest-to-Satan evil. So they funded and backed beyond bullshit wars, they invented fights. Petty fucking wars. Over lawns and systemic whatever and all manner of shit they made up. Over who fucked who at the office. Over jungles they couldn’t find on a map. Over the weather. Over nothing. Bored coddled gods with too many toys and too much goddamn time, brains rotted on Howdy Doody.

And they broke it. Oh, sweet bleeding Christ, did they break it. Everything. The scene? Thick with their bullshit agendas. The politic? Poisoned with their petty prejudices. The trust? Shattered like a whiskey bottle on payday Friday. The whole goddamn thousand year old engine – the one that was supposed to keep running at a minimum, keep things ticking over for the suckers coming next? They poured sugar in the tank and pissed in the radiator. Blaming the driver who couldn't afford to buy the broke down car after. Yeah, they're leaving the world steaming and smoking on the shoulder of the highway. For us. A magnificent, burning pile of shit.

Now? Now they’re fossils. Leathery skin, eyes like pissholes in the snow. But they’re sitting pretty. Hoarding their loot like Smaug on Viagra and ecstasy. Million dollar homes paid for with monopoly money from a rigged game. Retirement funds fattened on debt thicker than their own clogged arteries – debt we get to choke on for the next hundred fucking years. And they point their bony fingers? At us? From their pampered lives? “Look what you’ve done to the place!” they wheeze, while their pals rattle sabers louder than their walkers, itching to push the big red button that ends the whole sorry circus. Leaving us holding the Geiger counter.

Yeah. Gotta give the devils their due. The music? It ripped your guts out, Hendrix, Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd. The movies? Showed the maggots under the rock, Godfather, Apocalypse, Star Wars. The gadgets? Let us talk to Tokyo while taking a dump on a fancy toilet with more controls than my first car. Technologies and tools to make a new world. Maybe. Sharp ones. Maybe sharp enough to cut ourselves out of the straitjacket of illusions and outright malicious lies they stitched us into. To pierce through the barely hidden malevolence made their all-consumptive world possible. Gotta give it to them, though, when they were making shit up, they made up some good shit too.

So yeah. We’re pissed. A low, constant burn, like bad heartburn, might be your heart giving out. They’re mom and pop, though. Granny and gramps. And getting older… hell, it peels back the scab a little. They're still family, and we love the hell out of their deluded asses. We see the trap. The impossible fucking shadow they couldn't crawl out from under. They never stood a snowball’s chance in hell. How the hell does one live up to their fathers? Boomers were born to fail. Programmed to fuck it up. Destructive? Yeah. Selfish? Christ, yes! But maybe… maybe it was the only script they had. And, well, it's gotta be asked, who gave them the drugs that broke them and why?

It’ll take us a generation. Maybe two. To sift through the ashes of what their parents bombed flat and they pissed on. What was never rebuilt but only papered over. Decades, maybe a century, to build something that doesn’t stink of decay, cheap plastic and ugly fucking concrete. Something real. Something bigger than the Greatest Generation bombed out and the Boomers let finally rot. Maybe. If the big flash they feared as children but now keep cheering for doesn’t come first. If the evil fucks imported into the infrastructure of our countries, by the generation before the Boomer's parents, in Operation This and Operation That, don't walk us into cattle cars first.

Motherfucking Boomers? Thanks for the ride. The 70s, 80s, 90s… the sex, the noise, the neon, the sheer, stupid, glorious excess. It was a hell of a last binge for a civilization. A fucking epic flame-out. Beautiful, in its own rotten way. Born to wreck? Maybe. But you wrecked with style. And at least I’m gonna thank you for that. Some of the best times I’ve ever imagined or known. The chicks, the cocaine and the clubs were unfucking real awesome! Back before the shitstorm of a fight and war to survive you’re leaving us with now. As you die out, donating your wealth to charity, giving your kids and grandkids the middle finger one final time.

So here’s the dirty secret, you old bastards: I honor the fucked-up mess you made of it. Honest. The sheer, stupid gall. Who the fuck is that blind and just keeps plowing on as the world lights afire around them? Even so, I don’t wanna watch you cough out your last alone in some sterile box. You’re our parents and grandparents and that still means something, no matter what you did to end family. No matter how you left us to raise ourselves from the earliest days we can remember. Blaming us all the while for your fucking empty lives.

But make no mistake. While you’re rattling the keys to the kingdom, praying Peter will look the other way, eyeing that apocalyptic switch on your way out? We’re coming for the controls with force. You'll not get that chance to push the button. We're removing you from power. Before the flash turns your precious retirement portfolio into glass. Before the final curtain drops on your burning shit-pile fake and gay world.

We’re coming. To bury you? Yea, no getting around that. And that's gonna hurt, way more than it should. But first, we have to take power from you and restore the lock on the goddamn human made sun.