I’m hardly on X or Twitter (or Shitter) as I’ve heard it be called now. But comedian and transgender model Stacy Cay posed a good question – What did people in this country think would happen?
This past weekend, Donald Trump ordered tariffs placed on Canada, China and Mexico using the illegal spread of fentanyl and undocumented immigration as a reasoning. However, Canada has struck back saying they’re imposing tariffs on items as well, especially targeting red states.
In other words that Trump and his followers might understand. It’s like this “Fuck me?! Well, fuck you too!” As of this posting, I’m hearing that now, Trump plans to put on a hold on the tariffs on Canada and Mexico after speaking with Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.
Everyone told him it was a bad idea but he was going to go through with it anyway. My mother, may she rest in peace, used to say that if we did something she told us not to do and we got hurt, to not come crying to her.
Now, this might obviously be a smoke screen for how Elon Musk, a South African-born man, who as far as we know has not passed any security clearance, nor is he an elected official, more or less has control of the Treasury Department. You know, for a CEO of multiple companies, he seems to have a lot of free time on his hands. And Trump himself has bankrupt several big companies.
People I know tried to play this off in 2016 by saying, it was just a few out of hundreds. Yes, but it’s the major companies. Every successful businessperson has had one failure, or should I say less than stellar success at a business before realizing what to do next. It happens. But Trump couldn’t even keep a casino afloat. The house always wins? Not in Trump’s case.
It’s no surprise this is from the same era of people who were born in the post-WWII era. My friend and I are considered part of the latter Gen Xers (or younger Gen Xers called “Xennials”) as we were born in the mid to later 1970s. It seems most Gen Xers born in the late 1960s and early 1970s seem to see a lot through the rose-colored glasses of their Baby Boomer elders.
I mean, let’s face it. You have had all these movies like Dazed and Confused, The Big Chill and even American Graffiti that looked at an era as being the greatest time to be alive, as long as you were white, and a man, and from a well-to-do background, and from a rather metropolitan area. By no means was it a great time for everyone. And I think a lot of younger generations aren’t living under that bubble anymore once they get older and look back at the times.
But another friend of mine proposed a theory that it’s all based on the concept that many people in that era felt they were the biggest kid on the block. They were the Prom King and Queen, the Homecoming King and Queen, All-State Valedictorians. But the problem was the prosperity of the era came from the fact that manufacturing was pretty much at a standstill in Europe factories and buildings had been destroyed as well as able-bodied people of age to work in them.
Some of my relatives went north to the Detroit era where they were able to work for the automobile industry in some form of other. They bought nice cheap modest homes with basements and flourished because that was all they needed. That was until the 1970s and 1980s until a lot of people who didn’t really have to struggle like those that did during The Great Depression or WWII time did, got their turns to run things. And their philosophy is “I did it so everyone else can too.”
I still find it funny that during the Great Depression, the movie Reefer Madness was released. It was originally made as a fictional warning of a supposed “true problem” and released as Tell Your Children, before it was re-edited with new scenes added. Yes, people can’t work or get food in the mid-1930s but the biggest concern of the time is the well-to-do white people smoking that “whacky tobacky.” Sound familiar?
The problem is America is no longer the superpower it thought it was. The facts of the matter is the worst day for America is when the Soviet Union fell and America was standing around unable to move forward. It’s like the high school student who peaks in the 11th or 12th grade and then graduation day comes and the rest of the students go on to join the military, colleges and universities, technical colleges or even joining the workforce right out.
But America was still acting like that one person who turns 19 or 20 and still living with their parents because they don’t want to take that next step so many other people have do. And that person spends their 20s and 30s bouncing around. We’ve been bouncing around a lot for the past 35 years. Once we think we’re going to go forward, we have to take steps back. We’re the people who refuse to take a better job elsewhere out of fear of what will happen. Yes, it will be more work and responsibility. But you can’t stay young forever.
With Trump in office and his whole Make America Great Again mantra, what they really just want is a return to an era in which mostly white men were running things even if it was done poorly. Darren Beattie, the appointee for the State Department, feels the only thing that works correctly is if it’s done by competent white men.
Ok, then maybe all white men should start having babies and nursing them. I mean, maybe that’s the problem kids have ADHD is because men aren’t giving birth to babies. Maybe that’s why a football coach like Tommy Tuberville, who is the U.S. Senator from Alabama, thinks whipping and beating kids with belts will cure their ADHD. And why is a football coach even a U.S. Senator? Well, I guess it’s because our education system let them teach civics classes for decades, eventually one would go into politics successfully.
America needs to stop reading its own press and realize in 2025, you can’t keep acting it you’re the best when you’re still the 20-something who shows up at high school parties and wants to sit in the student section at games. You can only be the big fish in the small pond for so longer before there’s a bigger fish. And that’s just really an estuary where there is a huge ocean of water flowing inward.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 