#BitchAssGenerationProblems

“Kids these days are too fucking soft, specially with all this anti-bullying bullshit...back in the day you just had to man the fuck up and fight ya own battles. Bitch Ass generation.” –A Facebook Status

This may be news to many, but unless I’m mistaken, people being “soft,” that is to say emotionally impressionable and expressive, is not exactly a recent development, hence thousands of years of emotive literary works, ardent poetry, the concept of romance, etc.. Indeed, many of the people who would agree with the lovely quote above would probably say that this kind of bitch-ass behavior was explicitly reserved for women and that back in the day, men acted like men.

Fuck that.

These antiquated, primordial sentiments have no place in the modern industrialized world. Let’s consider the products of those good old days, shall we? The past 40-50 years-worth of adults, for a variety of reasons, have become a notoriously unstable generation (emotionally and sexually) and in the current day and age, proven to be riddled with neglectful parents. Contemporary social pressures, more accurately hypermasculinity and hyper-defined gender roles, confine individuals to one set of societally accepted behavior. Football teams likely swelled with eager initiates looking to impress their soul mate—the cheerleader.

America values an individual’s capacity to rise to the occasion and discourages people from asking for any kind of assistance. On one hand, this ideology promotes a healthy sense of self-determination and a will to strive for “good,” but at the same time, we’re vilified and called effeminate (because that is the worst insult of all, isn’t it?) for meeting with a psychiatrist or even discussing our problems with our friends. Be a man, everyone. Bottle everything up and maybe if you’re lucky, you won’t develop any unfortunate neuroses.

What have these expectations done to the world other than suffocate it? Is it not also true that most of the most influential and revolutionary individuals were to their peers, perhaps, the “weirdos,” the locker-stuffed, bullied, and beaten misfits? Yes, maybe these people rose above their personal adversity by themselves (and maybe they didn’t), but how the hell does that justify such a malignant ignorance toward the struggles of your fellow man? Who is to say that an individual who needs help at one point can’t go on to be that quintessential example of social Darwinism that you so badly want them to be?

Someone breaks a leg. That leg doesn’t heal instantly on account of pure willpower and yet we don’t leave them to starve because they can’t get to the dinner table. We bring them to a hospital, to see a doctor (you know, a person whose job it is to help people overcome physical trials [the active word in that sentence being “help”]) and then we give them crutches—we don’t carry them.

We should all be crutches: empathetic crutches for our family, friends, and even strangers, because seeing people walk again is a beautiful thing. Help them today so they can fight their own battles tomorrow.