Not only is this a great song from an amazing musical (Little Shop Of Horrors, the Ric Moranis version), but it opened my mind in a truly enlightening way.
It taught me that the boring standard middle class life I had always taken for granted growing up was somebody’s dream life.
And I did not have to look far for those somebodies. We were surrounded on all sides by working class families where if they were lucky, one member of the household actually had a job.
Being part of a primary resource economy really sucks, folks. It’s like being a writer : the people primarily responsible for bringing the thing into existence get treated the worst.
Anyhow, my family was not even slightly interested in the usual middle class “keeping up with the Joneses” social snobbery and competition bullshit. We’re all natural egalitarians. It’s how we were raised.
But we still had nicer stuff than our neighbors. And intentions and attitudes aside, I Am sure there were ways my siblings and I unconsciously expressed our economic status simply in the things we took for granted.
There have to have been times when we were looked upon with envy, if nor jealousy. Maybe even a little resentment,
And I was totally oblivious to this whole scene until that song, Somewhere That’s Green showed me that I was, in fact, rich, and always had been.
And yet. compared to the rich people in the one rich neighborhood in town, I was poor. And you could tell I was poor because all the other kids from the advanced classes I took in High School dressed way better than I ever could and showed up to school in nicer cars than my family could ever afford.
Added to the first observation, you can see how I came to realize that we are all rich and we are all poor. No matter how bad you think your life here in the golden paradise that is life in a WEIRD[1] nation, there are around two billion people in the world to whom your life seems like living in Heaven.
And no matter how good you think you’re doing, the One Percent sees you as being absolutely no different than the dirtiest drunk on Skid Row.
We’re all lowly scum in their eyes.
And to me, this leads naturally to a egalitarian humanist view of the world. I can’t deny compassion to someone simply because they are richer than me because I certainly wouldn’t want to be denied compassion by those who are poorer than me.
And I can’t look down on people poorer me unless I am perfectly fine with those richer than me looking down on me.
Pain is pain. Suffering is suffering. We all bleed the same color. All the things that truly matter – family, friends, relationships, community – are the same no matter what your circumstances are, and once you learn and accept this, your heart can open up to everybody because now you truly understand that we are all in this together and none of the silly ways in which we divide ourselves from one another really matter when compared to the challenges we face just trying to get through life together.
Like I always say, we’re all just drunken monkeys stumbling through the dark trying to find the door into happiness. Nobody really knows what they are doing or what the hell is going on, and the people who seem like they have it all figured out are people who have only thing figured out and that’s how to fake it really convincingly.
One of the ironies of the modern age is that the people who seem to be living the best possible lives on Instagram are actually the ones with no life at all because everything they do is calculated to impress people on Instagram.
The people who put on the best show are always the one with the most to hide.
More after the break.
Everything is stupid and nothing matters
Gonna stick that on a T-shirt one of these days. Who knows, it might catch on with today’s angsty, neurotic, freaking out all the time Gen Z kids.
I found out why they are like that. One fact made it all make sense to me : they came of age AFTER 9/11. So of course they don’t see the world as a safe or happy place.
Plus, you know, the planet’s on fire, we’re losing democracies, and all over the world, the lunatics are taking over.
But it’s probably just the 9/11 thing.
One bit of sort of good news : some of them seem to be at least dimly aware that they were raised by us, Gen X, and not the Boomers or the Millennials.
I’ve given up on the Millennials. As far as they’re concerned, they were somehow raised by the Boomers just like we were.
Not sure how that is possible. Pretty sure you can’t have two generations in a row raised by the same generation. That’s demographically impossible.
Still, it’s probably at least partly our fault, or rather, the fault of our collective “fuck off and leave me alone” attitude.
I mean, we never had our Boomer parents’ full attention anyhow, and when they did suddenly remember they’d had kids at some point they often only made things worse by trying to then speed-run parenting with “quality time” so we learned to just tell them whatever they wanted to hear so we could go back to being sullen.
It took up a lot of our time. That, and Nintendo.
So no wonder history forgets us so easily. We’re reclusive and passively hostile. We actively encouraged the world to forget about us when we were younger.
And it’s not like our parents were going to remember us.
Damn it, I meant to talk about Gen Z and got sidetracked bitching about the Boomers.
Even when they’re not in the room, they somehow make it all about them!
Well what I really wanted to say is that I feel like we, as a generation, fail the Gen Z’s in some deep and terrible way.
One theory is that we unconsciously assumed that they would be as stoic about their cynicism as we are and thus we passed that cynicism on down to them.
But they’re not like us. Their cynicism is far more panicky and desperate and eager for any fucking shred of hope and meaning they can find, which is why they tend to fall prey to ingroup identities in a way we never would.
Just imagine you’re a Gen Z kid who desperately needs someone to give them a pep talk and reassure them that everything is going to be all right and they go to their Gen X parent for it and instead of that get, “Yup. Everything and everyone sucks. Might as well get used to it.”
Oh well. At least they know we’ll always be there for them.
I just wish we had a little more sunshine to share with them,
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.