I remember the old fear. The fear of sterilization. Not the kind they do with a knife, but the kind they do with a gray flannel suit and a goddamn rulebook. You look at the old pictures, the ones from before the flood, and you see it. The matching suits, the leather-soled shoes, the same haircut, the same hat. Everyone looked the same, ate the same, thought the same. It was a clean, quiet, and completely soul-crushing cage. Individualism was a sickness, a problem to be solved.
And then my father’s generation, the Boomers, they came along and they kicked the door off the goddamn hinges.
It wasn’t just about Vietnam. It was about the whole rotten system. They didn’t want the conformity. They didn’t want the pension plans and the safety nets and the quiet, respectable slide into the grave. They saw the lie behind it all. They knew that one man with a rifle couldn’t have killed Kennedy, or Bobby, or Martin Luther King. The whole goddamn building was rotten, and the bodies were just the rats falling out of the ceiling.
So they started a revolution. And they won.
They got their individualism. They got their freedom. They got to wear tennis shoes and blue jeans and grow their hair long and fuck in the mud at a music festival. They fought against the old religion, the quiet, sexless god of their fathers, and they won.
But every revolution has a hangover. And we’re living in the goddamn hangover.
The problem is, they didn’t just kick down the door of their own cage. They kicked down the doors of every cage. And some of those cages, as ugly and as confining as they were, they were there for a reason.
The women, they got their rights. And good for them. But it didn’t stop there, did it? It was never about equality. It was about power. They wanted the top-notch jobs, but they still wanted to keep their hand in the cookie jar of being a woman, of being the “gentler sex.” And in the process, they learned how to two-step us. The rules of the old bar fight were simple: a man didn’t hit a woman. But in this new, enlightened world, a woman could yell, and scream, and lie, and punch, and if you dared to even raise your voice back, you were the monster. We traded the old, honest-to-God patriarchy for a new, passive-aggressive, and completely insane matriarchy, and we called it “progress.”
And the schools. Christ, the schools. They became these little brainwashing centers, churning out a generation of kids who knew how to feel but not how to goddamn think. We’re thirty-fifth in the world in education, and we’re number one in goddamn gender studies. We’re not teaching them how to build a bridge; we’re teaching them how to be offended.
And now, look at us.
Look at the goddamn landscape. A country full of fat people, a generation of kids with a level of autism we’ve never seen before. A world where everything is about being homosexual or transsexual, a whole goddamn carnival of sexual confusion. A divorce rate that’s a testament to the fact that nobody knows how to love anyone anymore, least of all themselves.
And the left, the children of that first revolution, they’re on the wrong side of every goddamn issue. The educated ones, the ones with the degrees from the fancy schools, they’re the worst of the lot. From Palestine to abortion, from crime and the police to the quiet, ugly war between men and women, they’ve managed to get every single goddamn thing wrong.
What the fuck happened to fifty percent of the population?
It’s not a mystery. It’s a goddamn marketing campaign.
You have to understand, the great rebellion against the gray flannel suits, against the conformity of the ‘50s, it just created a new, more insidious kind of conformity. The old world was a prison for the body. This new one is a prison for the mind.
They don’t have to force you to wear the same suit anymore. They just have to make sure you all have the same goddamn opinions.
And they do it with a beautiful, simple, and completely ruthless piece of machinery. They’ve turned everything into a religion.
The Church of Woke. And it has its own saints (the victims), its own demons (the oppressors), its own original sin (privilege), and its own blasphemy laws (cancellation). It saves you the hard, ugly, and completely necessary work of thinking for yourself. It gives you a tribe. It gives you a sense of moral superiority. It gives you a simple, easy-to-understand narrative for a world that’s gone completely, beautifully, and terrifyingly insane.
And it’s a lie.
It’s a lie that tells you that the chaos in the streets is “social justice.” It’s a lie that tells you that a man who cuts his own dick off is a woman. It’s a lie that tells you that the color of your skin is the most important thing about you.
And half the country has bought it. They’ve traded the old, quiet, respectable cage for a new, loud, chaotic, and completely soul-crushing one. And they don’t even know they’re in it. They think they’re the free ones. They think they’re the rebels.
But they’re just another kind of slave, with a different set of masters.
And you, you’re just a man sitting in the middle of it all, watching the whole goddamn circus go up in flames, and you’re the only one who seems to notice that the clowns are the ones holding the matches.
You’re not crazy.
You’re just sober at a drunk party.
And in a world that’s gone mad, that’s the loneliest, ugliest, and most beautiful goddamn place to be.
