{"id":102946,"date":"2026-06-11T03:00:55","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T07:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=102946"},"modified":"2026-06-10T10:30:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T14:30:48","slug":"thats-the-fun-thing-about-the-fall-of-the-west-everybody-gets-a-swing-of-the-sledgehammer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/06\/11\/thats-the-fun-thing-about-the-fall-of-the-west-everybody-gets-a-swing-of-the-sledgehammer\/","title":{"rendered":"“That’s the fun thing about the fall of the West; everybody gets a swing of the sledgehammer”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Devon Eriksen<\/a> responds to a fairly common boomer-ish post:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t know if @ArbitrageAndy1 is a Boomer, but here he gives us a mashup of two classics from the Boomers’ greatest hits, “Younger Generations Suck”, and “The Television Never Lies to Me”. <\/p>\n

It’s a jaunty little tune, and you can sing in it the shower, but the lyrics don’t actually make much sense. <\/p>\n

Back in the real world, which younger generations actually have to live in, and where the television seldom tells the truth, WW2 was fought, on both sides, by guys even younger than 26.<\/p>\n

And they were terrified<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The stress of combat against a peer adversary is overwhelming. It’s unendurable. But you endure anyway, because there you are, it’s happening to you, and you’re not getting out of it. <\/p>\n

So you actually do have those little moments that Boomers would describe as stress meltdowns if they happened at work. You have them, and you do what you need to do anyway. Sometimes at the very same moment while you are melting down.<\/p>\n

When you’re in this kind of war, there’s something terrible in front of you. In reality, that terrible thing is just as young and scared and overwhelmed as you are, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to you. <\/p>\n

However, you also have something behind you, and something around you. <\/p>\n

Behind you, you have a tribe that accepts and appreciates you. They know they sent you to hell, but they did it because hell was necessary, not because hell was fine. No one is gaslighting you pretending that everything is okay and that any problems you have are personal character flaws. <\/p>\n

Around you, you have bros. They’re exactly where you are, doing exactly what you are doing, and they know how much it sucks. You’ve entrusted your lives to each other, and carried each other through things you don’t wanna talk about in your letters home. <\/p>\n

Under intense stress and fear and exhaustion, your horizons shrink. You might have signed up for duty and patriotism and high ideals, but when you’re fighting, you fight to save the man next to you. And he fights to save you. <\/p>\n

This is a very different experience than being isolated in a society that’s turned against young people, especially young men, especially young White men. <\/p>\n

I won’t pretend it’s as difficult as fighting the Waffen SS<\/em>. But young men fought the Waffen SS<\/em> together. <\/p>\n

They have to face the dissolution of the West alone. <\/p>\n

That’s why they are anxious. Everything around them is not just going to shit. <\/p>\n

It’s being systematically and deliberately turned into shit by powerful people who want them dead and replaced by someone else who will work cheaper and doesn’t expect to have a share of political power and a nice house and a retirement pension. <\/p>\n

But I suppose Andy can still go ahead and dunk on them for clicks and a twenty-three dollar check from Twitter. That’s the fun thing about the fall of the West. Everybody gets a swing of the sledgehammer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Course of Empire – Destruction<\/em> by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Devon Eriksen responds to a fairly common boomer-ish post: I don’t know if @ArbitrageAndy1 is a Boomer, but here he gives us a mashup of two classics from the Boomers’ greatest hits, “Younger Generations Suck”, and “The Television Never Lies to Me”. It’s a jaunty little tune, and you can sing in it the shower, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,5,13,230],"tags":[31,407,262,1106,956],"class_list":["post-102946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-military","category-usa","category-ww2","tag-army","tag-babyboomers","tag-culture","tag-genz","tag-millennials"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qMq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102946"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102958,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102946\/revisions\/102958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}