The Breakfast Club Revisited

I'm Generation X. You know — that "silent" generation you haven't heard much from or about until recently. The generation you don't want to hear from because we can smell bullshit from a mile away, and aren't afraid to call you on it.

They're back to explain their experience.

Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless

When @foreverlikethis asked me to submit an article for the IndieWeb Carnival earlier this month, I had just watched a review of John Hughe's 1985 cinematic masterpiece The Breakfast Club posted by @TheMirandalorian on YouTube. Miranda is a Zoomer, and she was watching the film for the first time. I was amused by her genuine shock at the way parents and teachers talked to the kids in the movie. It had seemed perfectly normal to us Back in the Day™. I'd thought nothing of it until she drew attention to it. I got the impression that Miranda must've had a sheltered childhood, and noted the irony that the tough, independent "latchkey kids" of the 1980s went on to become the over-protective "helicopter parents" of the Millennials and Zoomers.

Claire: "My God, are we gonna be like our parents?"

Alison: "It's inevitable. When you grow up, your heart dies."

We didn't become our parents because, as I said, we'd smelled the bullshit, and weren't exactly itching for a repeat. One could argue that the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction, but it is what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Internalization, both positive and negative, was a central theme of The Breakfast Club, which is why the Carnival invite was particularly well-timed. One might say it was "synchronistic," if one is inclined to bastardize the term in the usual colloquial way. Each of the teenagers had internalized the stereotypes applied to their respective cliques by their elders, and by themselves. The movie ends with an epiphany, in which the youths see through the Boomeristic pigeon-holing and labeling bullshit, and discover they're all basically the same. The recognition of sameness is demonstrated by allowing one member of the group, Brian, to complete the writing assignment on behalf of the whole group.

I like to talk shit about the Boomers every chance I get because — well, because they're Boomers. I'm not gonna do that today. For the past thirty years or more, we've had a steady diet of "Boomer this" and "Boomer that." This isn't about the Boomers. It's about the future, and, sorry, Boomers, but y'all ain't in it.

The salient part of Miranda's film review comes at the 43:15 mark, when the movie is over and she gives her analysis. She notes that having good grades in school, although meaningless in itself, is given undue importance as a metric for measuring success. Brian considered committing suicide because his over-achieving parents found low grades to be unacceptable. I'm sure we can all think of ways in which arbitrary external gauges are erroneously applied when valuating things, often with dire consequences.

Miranda goes on to explain how the movie is all about perspective. The parents and teachers may be calling the shots, but it is Carl, the lowly janitor, who has the most comprehensive ground-level intelligence on the school's staff and students.

Carl: "I am the eyes and ears of this institution, my friends."

Each person's perspective is based on their own rather narrow experience of the world. Few of us have a "thirty thousand foot view." It's because of that, Miranda says, that she strives to be more aware of what's going on with the people around her, and to be kind to others regardless of whether she's having a good day or a bad day. If you ask me, the Zoomers are shaping up to be one of the most astute generations to come along in awhile — or at least those Zoomers fortunate enough to survive the modern public education system without being brainwashed.

Late in the movie, the kids sit in a circle on the floor, passing a joint and baring their souls. In many primitive cultures, sitting together on the ground is a way of demonstrating parity. In Little House on the Prairie, Wilder recounts how Pa and the Indian squatted together by the fire, smoking their pipes in silence. Anyway, it's during this encounter session that the young people in The Breakfast Club come to realize how much they have in common. Sharing a doobie was certainly conducive to establishing an egalitarian mindset.

For what it's worth, here's my takeaway.

I was twenty-two years old in the early 1990s when I smoked cannabis for the first time. Before that, I'd bought into the Reefer Madness horseshit. Growing up in the 1980s, we were constantly bombarded with the slogan "Just Say No." Cannabis was, and still is, classified as a dangerous narcotic by the Federal government, although we've since come to realize how absurd that is.

A lot of my positive memories from early adulthood involve smoking weed. My friends and I would hang out in public parks or in empty fields a short drive from the city, listening to CDs on a boombox, just relaxing and talking about nothing in particular. Meaningful conversations have a way of unfolding when you're transplanted from a workaday context into a natural environment. It was easy to make friends back then. We had to go outside every single day. When you spend a significant amount of time outside of the home or workplace, you meet a lot of different people.

I feel that "smart" phones and social media have reduced the opportunities for impromptu encounters of that kind. In the real world prior to the Internet, our daily activities required us to deal with people from all walks of life. We didn't get to pick and choose everybody we interacted with. We certainly didn't make snap decisions about a person's worth based on a photograph or something that person might have said twenty or fifty years ago when they were young and impulsive.

Yes, there were, and always have been, and always will be, cliques of like-minded people, as The Breakfast Club illustrates. But we knew it wasn't generally in our best interest to pass moral judgement on strangers whose personal circumstances we knew little or nothing about. There always existed the likelihood that we'd have to deal with them, or others like them, again at some point. It made sense to try to get along with everybody, to do our part to reduce social friction as much as possible.

Today, we're plagued with an online "cancel culture" dictated to us by a handful of screeching narcissists. People think they're too good to associate with anybody who isn't part of a very small select group. Their preferred clique is often a group that they, themselves, aren't even part of, and have little hope of attaining to on their own merit. There is no sense of knowing one's place, of staying in one's own lane or paygrade. A third of young men are virgins. A growing number of women remain unwed and childless past menopause. Each sex blames the other for this dystopian state of affairs, and insists that the other sex "deserves" the consequences they're now suffering. The outrage mob condemns people to hell for objectively trivial faux pas — and they do not forgive, even when the perceived transgressor abandons his or her own moral values and repents. They demand that bystanders join them in their condemnation, lest they be tarred with the same brush.

Consequently, most of the positive experiences that I've internalized in the Internet era are almost as far removed in time from the present day as are my memories of the pre-Internet world. I'd have to look as far back as MySpace, or WinMX, or even cgi-bin chatrooms, to find one. But I'm not holding my breath awaiting a return of the Golden Age to see me through. Those days are gone, and they ain't coming back. We have to start from where we are. I will, however, take a lesson from the Golden Age of the Internet that I believe will still work today, namely:

DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.

Friends, in order to create the world we want, we must eliminate everything that isn't part of the world we want. All of it. If we take sides in the hatefest, then that is the world we're part of. And as long as we consent to be part of it, nothing will change.

Moving forward, I intend to make a conscious effort to support neither wokeism nor anti-wokeism. I'll neither participate in the "debate," if you can call it that, nor will I watch it as a neutral third party from the sidelines. I'll give it all of the time and attention it deserves, which, according to my calculations, is exactly none. Anything having to do with "cancel" or "woke" or "DEI" or "pronouns" — for or against — will be summarily and pre-emptively deleted or blocked. That includes the so-called battle of the sexes, as well as imaginary dualisms such as "privileged" versus "marginalized." I won't participate in any forum where the disease is permitted to fester. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, but they're not entitled to bother me with it. I won't be an unwilling accomplice in manifesting hate into reality.

That's not to say I won't still rip you a new bunghole if you cross me, just so we're clear. 😉

This isn't high school, gang. We're all grownups here. Let's stop focusing on our differences, and instead focus on our commonalities. Every one of us is a princess, and an athlete, and a scholar, and a criminal, and a basket case. ��❤️������❤️��