A national television commentator who passed away last month began many of his segments with the phrase, “Don’t you just hate it when…?” and then he’d slide into a rant — albeit a humorous one — about whatever it was he disliked that day.
I loved to listen to Andy Rooney, but I’ve always tried in my own writing — especially in opinion pieces — to steer clear of “hating” things. It’s all too easy in this “us-versus-them” era of oversimplified opinions for debate, or even a simple comment, to be twisted into outrage.
What I’ve tried to do instead is identify something I might like — or may not — and then use my personal experiences to explain it. I try to include you, too, by encouraging (some might say, “inciting,”) actions I’m confident you are too intelligent to actually do. Like displaying expired parking stickers on your cars as an easy method of making donations to the college, or abandoning up Musko the Muskie as the school mascot in favor of machete-wielding Children of the Corn. Or even really listening to “In A Gadda Da Vida.” Yow!
Having said that…
Don’t you just hate it when you return to college after a long hiatus — a college with an outstanding pub right there on campus — and find that you’ve not only reached drinking age this time around, but have unfortunately gone far beyond it, to a place where when you drink anything containing alcohol you immediately get the hangover, but never quite make it to the buzz? And how you know when you’ve reached that age because when it happens you say… “Bummer.”
If you wait long enough the cons sometimes become pros, and vice-versa. Take, for instance, the way each generation tries to shock the previous one, occasionally returning things to the way they were.
We Baby Boomers tried to shock our parents by dropping out of the post-war materialism boom during the 1960s, and then our children embraced Gordon Gekko (“Wall Street) and Alex P. Keaton (“Family Ties”) as their own heroes, seemingly just to torment us. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
Today’s emerging generation doesn’t seem to have settled on any specific direction yet. Fresh new music is replacing years of Golden Oldies. That reminds me of the Sixties and Seventies, when those oldies were originally produced. But walking around campus, I’m beginning to see some clothes on members of that same generation that mirror past trends — like the age of disco.
And while we seem to be more fragmented as a society than ever before, that’s mostly the fault of earlier generations — like my own Boomer generation, GEN-X, and my child’s Echo-Boom generation — that are falling back into self-serving egoism in the name of the individual, and resurrecting intolerance because, well… these days, considering the feelings of others can be easily blown off by calling it “politically correct.”