"@AngryBlackLady", who was a wall street foreclosure lawyer during the housing crisis, tweeted:
Seriously Gen X was built to last. If you survived ya childhood, you are a magical being. Remember how swings didn't used to have shit underneath them but concrete? If you fell off, you would just have nasty scrapped knees.
Generational theory is an essential part of fascism because they can't admit they're bourgeois class traitors who want the poor to die.
That's not even the worst of it. Participation awards are a physical reminder that you're a loser. They might as well have printed "Last Place, Fuck You" on them. No kid ever felt good about getting one of these.
It’s like participation trophies: those existed to protect the egos of parents kids didn’t give a fuck about them.
fuuuuuuck i never connected that dot
And that's barely even scratching the surface about how fucking weird bougie children's sports are. My parents kitted me out in a bunch of expensive hockey gear when I was five years old, and I didn't give a shit about any of it. I sat over by the other team's goalie and we talked about cool looking marbles, while I dug a hole in the ice with my skates. I got a trophy for that. It was dumb as hell.
As an older kid? Give us some sticks and we'll organize some sort of bootleg field hockey every time. Give us a big ball? Either kind of football is fair game, along with maybe a kickball diamond we dig into the grass with our heels.
Our local swing set had a drug dealer who didn't like kids hanging around, until someone's dad flipped his shit at him and beat him with a bat while screaming about communal property.
If i may share my childhood trauma with everyone
Anyway. Anyone whining about how good kids have it nowadays are insane. They're inheriting a broken earth, and all the comforts they get until then are ones we made.
The drug dealer lost a couple of teeth and we got our playground back.
I'm Gen X, and I survived my childhood.
And I can promise you that I am in no way any sort of "magical being".
If a participation trophy throws you off enough to believe that you can't fail, then you have bigger issues. How do you watch your parents go to work everyday and make a variable income or go to school and have your effort reflected, and not understand failure? How do you lose a game and not percieve failure? I guess I understand that you're seeing it as parents who aggressively coddle their children, that's not right either. But I don't really come at it from this angle and I think that that style of parenting has to be in the minority.
While it can be argued that participation trophies really don't do anything, I believe that they encourage sticking with something and seeing value in something beyond WIN/LOSE. Drowning in that binary makes it hard for people to focus on skill building fundamentals and frustrates discipline. In the long run, I'd argue that the obsession of win/lose is detrimental to a person fulfilling their potential.
More importantly, it's hard to foster actual passion for something that puts you in that state of win or lose by default. It's hard to care about Violin when your only relation to it is your tiger parent telling you to practice it several hours a day.
I'm of the opinion that anything that encourages skill growth is better than anything that makes the process miserable or deincentivizes skill growth.
I'm not gen x but in the 90s every swing set I ever used was in a pit of sand to cushion your fall.
Imagine the self loathing that would have to grow from years of waking up every day and actively working to make people homeless.
That requires self reflection, based on this tweet I don't think she does that
Seatbelts are for wimps. Back in my day if you survived collision at 15 mph it made you hard as fuck
back in the good old days we TRIED to go out the windshield during an accident otherwise we'd be impaled by the steering column. these boomer cucks with their "safety standards" and "crumple zones" are nothing but snowflakes.
