Millennials are vexing their baby boomer elders/bosses by breaking ranks on the mother of all individual rights issues – gun control.
The millennial generation just isn’t buying the BS:
The article – by millennial filmmaker Jesse Winton – explores a number of theories for this phenomenon, both Winton’s own and some of the inevitably condescending, laughable ones from the big media.
I’ve got my own theory.
If “The Walking Dead” and its various spinoffs aren’t the #1 cable show among millennials, they’re certainly on the short list. They – and the popularity of dystopian literature, TV and films ranging like “The Hunger Games” franchise through the popularity of frayed-around-the-edges entertainment from “Batman” through “Narcos” – reflect a whole different attitude about the world, and at least some subconscious view of the future, than previous generations had.
But the popularity of “Walking Dead” in particular – on its surface, a story about a zombie apocalypse, which is really a meditation on human nature in a world without external order (similar to Trulbert, although my book used satire rather than exploding zombie brains as its medium) – should tell us something about millennials’ view of the world; they see, consciously or not, that “order” is an artificial and paper-thin construct when things go very very off the rails.
I had that same moment, 35 years ago. It was long after the glory days of the zombie B-movie, and decades before “Walking Dead”. My ‘ZOMPOC” moment was reading Alas Babylon by Pat Frank – the story of a small central Florida town in the middle of a Cuban Missile Crisis gone horribly, cut off from the world and left to its own devices. The book – which I read when I was still a liberal, and still more or less in favor of some sort of gun control – and the years of observing human behavior since then, in one disaster after another, left me with the ineluctable conclusion; while humans are supremely capable of self-organization, there will be some segment of the population whose self-organization will be to prey off the rest of the world.
In disaster after disaster – from acute crises like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, to the LA riots, to the ongoing collapses of order in places like Detroit, Oakland, Saint Louis and the less fashionable parts of Chicago – it became clear that trusting “society” to take care of you was a pollyannaish abdication of your responsibility to yourself, your family, and your society.
I think millennials – entering the workforce at a time when the things previous generations had seen as guarantees were just not happening – have questioned a lot of the assumptions that lead the smugger, more entitled parts of our society to embrace disarming the law-abiding.
Because the world is always throwing zombies of one type or another at us; history is spectacularly unkind to the idea that there’ll be a Rick Grimes riding to your rescue, always and forever.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.