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.
clearly its enough of a trend among millennials that major ammunition mfgrs are catering to the “need”:http://www.hornady.com/ammunition/zombiemax
C’mon, kel. Who does not have an EOTech with a biohazard reticle?
Alas, Babylon? I remember reading that in Jr. High, having picked up a yellowed copy at a used book store near campus. My memories are foggy, but I actually preferred that to Lucifer’s Hammer since it had more “normal” heroes.
As for the idea of self-reliance, I’ll note that Millennials are also taking out less debt on average for similar reasons: they’ve seen what debt can do to you in a crisis. I’ve always had a dread of debt, mainly from having listened to my grandparents’ tales of what it was like in the Depression. The Depression wasn’t actually a bad time — provided you had a job or business. I know some parts of my extended family went bust from too much debt invested in family businesses so that they couldn’t survive the business cycle resetting down, and most of the extended family learned the lesson that taught. Debt is useful, but very risky.
Nerd,
I read it when I was 14, I think, and along with “The Black Book”, it had a huge efefcts on me.
And I agree, the characters were more accessible to me, then and now, than those in Lucifer’s Hammer – although I won’t knock the book, since Jerry Pournelle was known to read this blog not tooooo long ago, and linked to several pieces I wrote on the blog he used to do…
Dittos on what Nerdbert says about debt and the Depression. I’ve actually got the papers my granddad used to buy my great-granddad’s farm for him, and the prices he paid for that land are just amazing. Anyone who could keep a job and a bit of free capital safe from bank failures did pretty good.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked Lucifer’s Hammer … but just not as much as I liked Alas, Babylon.
But I will have to say that Pournelle’s Inferno was a lot more accessible to modern readers than Dante’s. 😉 I had to struggle through a lot of the references in Dante, not having a grasp of the politics or characters of the time.
Check this link out. This woman shows no fear as she shoots it out with three black home invaders.
http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/09/23/video-woman-opens-fire-armed-robbers-georgia-home
Badass
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What’s better is that the woman is of Asian descent. I wonder if BLM will be marching around her house.
I see the next “I am the NRA” PSA.
I was roughly 10 or 11 when I read Alas Babylon, growing up in Florida. The location in the book could easily have been my town. It was riveting.
Lucifer’s Hammer was much later. Both good stories.
All of my grandparents were part of the depression. However, it really affected my maternal grandmother. She turned into a hoarder (altho not quite as bad as the absolute worst examples you see on Hoarders…she at least had pathways and wasn’t literally walking on/crawling over her junk). She managed to “infect” all 3 of her kids with the same affliction. Their respective spouses did manage/have managed to fight back the tendency, but when my parents got divorced and also when my aunt died from Leukemia, my mom and uncle also got really bad with the saving/hoarding and the excuses for saving/hoarding.