Fight On, Oldsters!

City, we need to talk. Stop antagonizing each other and try behaving like halfway decent people without grudges. I get it. Most of you are incredibly old and frightened at the way this country is progressing toward anarchy. Things are happening at an alarmingly fast rate and you feel helpless. 

Your ability to affect change is severely muted by infirmity, muddled reason or stubbornness.

And the music the kids are listening to these days!

If it’s not a blood-drinking Goth vampire, it’s a half-naked slut belching incomprehensible lyrics to a house beat sounding like a whooping crane farting “The Star Spangled Banner”.

You can’t relate to anyone younger than you. You think the Democrats are socialist hippies who want to turn America into a clothing optional commune where Jane Fonda reads excerpts from “The Communist Manifesto” while Che Guevara look-alikes with goatees rape your daughters with rolled up issues of Mother Jones magazine.

Those loud-mouth liberal teachers are indoctrinating our children by teaching evolution, science and critical thinking skills. God forbid they should force children to write the entire Bible out longhand while flagellating themselves with a cat o’ nine tails.

You know: just like when you were kids.

City, you’re just a throwback to a dark, ugly chapter in this country’s history when ignorance was bliss and oppression of minorities was business as usual.

You eke out your remaining days in Florida condos, clutching your pain medication and howling at television, grousing about arthritis, angina and senility.

City, you’re broken.

But it’s not your fault. It’s your defense mechanism because you’re growing old.

It’s scary what’s happening to you. You wish to rage against the dying of the light, to turn back the clock to a time when America was the clean-shaven good guy with a firm handshake and can-do smile. When America was decent, and just and moral. When the fiction crammed into your head by Golden Age Hollywood filled you with promise and passion.

Where are the Humphrey Bogarts, Carey Grants and Jimmy Stewarts now?

Moldering in tombs and winking at us from their preserved black and white cells where they eternally remind us of the days when we fought Nazis, fed the poor and rolled up our sleeves because we could.

Because it was the right thing to do.

Back when we didn’t view differences, but found similarities.

A time of generous millionaires and glorified public service.

When the government wasn’t looked upon as a plague of locusts.

When industry moved America and our skyscrapers touched the heavens as our ideas touched the minds and hearts of many around the world.

Back when you fell in love.

But now, as the years fell away, you’re left old and broken, flustered at society’s lightspeed pace, at the edges fraying and coming apart, of entropy and vice breaking everything apart.

Everything you built is unraveling and you’re angry.

So you direct your rage toward those you view as agents of America’s destruction:

Liberals.

Journalists.

Teachers.

Democrats.

Scientists.

Secularists.

Minorities.

You hate them with a nuclear explosion-sized rage ball of hot white fire. If only they would go away, you’d know America would be taken back. Control seized from the boogeymen destroying this land.

Know what?

I don’t blame you, city.

You’re too old to remember what it meant to stumble, to fail. You view failure as weakness, but it’s an integral part of the human condition, for without the occasional screw up, we wouldn’t learn.

Learning brings wisdom, and that leads to making the correct decisions.

Nothing wimpy about that, city.

So if you continue to bleat and prattle on about phantom threats to your liberty, of perceived secularists vying to remove God from your life and country, I don’t mind.

You’re a cantankerous fogey who lost the ability for compassion and social niceties, a gaggle of bitter old mahjong-playing biddies, a flock of geriatric grumblers who despise what you can’t comprehend.

You’re set in your ways, and that’s cool. Nostalgia is your panacea, your miracle elixir.

So rave on, liver spots dappling your pasty flesh, bony fists shaking at an indifferent God. Froth and jibber at the dirty thugs running the government, the media, the entertainment industry. Blather like Clint Eastwood in a furniture store filled with empty chairs. 

You're a bunch of Custers and this is your last stand. Fight your good fight despite change being an inevitable juggernaut. Push those boulders, Sysiphus. Push those boulders.

Of course I’ll get off your lawn, city.

Don’t want any footprints marring your Astroturf.