Say what you will about the MAGA movement. A necessary premise of its core argument is that America was once a great nation, but somewhere along the line we lost our way. The fact that this message resonated with half the country should sound alarm bells.
An older thread from a Catholic Millennial on Twitter resurfaced recently. Its contents are germane to the topic, so it’s reproduced below.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel pity for Lo-fi Republican’s family–or perhaps a nagging sense of unease.
One key takeaway from his heart-wrenching thread is a defining trait of Millennials that distinguishes them from Generation Y. Gen Y has an often unhealthy obsession with the past. Millennials have been conditioned to hate and reject it.
Where did this conditioning come from? A seemingly unrelated thread by Appendix N author Jeffro Johnson suggests an answer.
Grant’s forefathers bequeathed him the finest house in town. They’d carefully built it up over the generations until what had started as a two-bedroom farmhouse had grown into a stately mansion when Grant’s father passed custody of the property to him. Grant worked diligently to maintain his patrimony, even donating copious time, treasure, and talent to the neighborhood watch when riots in another neighborhood threatened his street. As a result of Grant’s efforts, the family home attained its greatest glory yet.
Weary from his labors, Grant retired and left the great old house to his younger brother, Silas. The junior sibling quietly oversaw the estate’s operation for a while, but it wasn’t long before his niece and nephew Bonnie and Bob voiced discontent. The family had been plodding along in a rut for too long, and if they were going to live under the same roof as their elders, it was high time the youth had a say in how things were run.
Silas had grave misgivings about Bob and Bonnie’s novel ideas, but he mostly kept them to himself. Anyway, he was outnumbered, and for some unknown reason, their father Grant recused himself from the debate.
Around this time, the neighborhood association convinced Grant and Silas to hire maids and groundskeepers to help them maintain the property, since Bob and Bonnie were more interested in harping on their newfangled ideas than washing dishes or mowing lawns.
It turned out later that the neighborhood association had an under-the-table deal with the town’s bank, which in turn held a significant stake in rather shady housekeeping and landscaping firms. But nobody noticed until it was too late.
Bonnie and Bob’s numbers won out over Silas’ timid disposition. They took control of the estate and set to upending house rules that had governed the family since the two-room farmhouse days. Bonnie and Bob argued that what worked for small farmers might not work for more sophisticated people. They unflinchingly questioned all of the family’s traditions. After all, they said, we should question everything–except the belief that everything should be questioned.
Kept up by strangers and unmoored from the rules that had guided its owners for generations, the house soon fell into disrepair. The family fell into disrepute as representatives of the town bank goaded them into petty feuds with their neighbors, and even strangers across town.
Despite their vocal suspicion of received wisdom, Bonnie and Bob still went through the motions of the family’s main traditions. They mostly ignored Silas’ son Jon, who enjoyed the mansion’s luxuries while nursing moderate resentment at having been passed over. Still, he tried his best to be a good uncle to Bonnie’s son Xander and Bob’s son Yves, the latter of whom grew up largely confined to the room that his elders had turned into a miniature wonderland of candy and toys.
Yves’ only contact with reality came from his infrequent talks with Xander. He looked up to his cousin, but the older boy exuded a frightening bitterness that Yves couldn’t understand. He suspected that Xander was a little crazy when he said that things at the house had been better when his father was young. Yves also couldn’t comprehend Xander’s apparent dislike of his mother and uncle. Life was good, and it was all thanks to them.
The day he turned eighteen, Xander moved out of the mansion and into the guest house across the property. He largely cut ties with the family but would put up Christmas lights every other year. Yves missed his cousin, but he didn’t have long to dwell on it before his dad suddenly threw him out. It was past time he grew up and made his own way, his father said. Aunt Bonnie sagely agreed.
Yves stumbled in a state of shock through the disheveled waste of the mansion’s once-lush garden. He only met sullen strangers–cronies of the shady hired hands who’d stealthily bled the family’s finances over the years while bringing in more and more of their accomplices. Finally, he holed up a dank tool shed behind the house. Only memories of a golden childhood spent in the warm, safe room he couldn’t quite glimpse through the grimy windows remained to keep him company.
Jon’s daughter Millicent, meanwhile, had been turned loose as a toddler to run wild in the yard. Raised by the hired help, their spiteful hangers-on, and social workers from City Hall, i.e. the town bank, she believed that her family had stolen the house from their hirelings’ ancestors. Bonnie and Bob had assured Jon that his daughter would come up with new rules that worked for her, but instead she grew up entirely directionless with a burning resentment toward family traditions known only through her strange surrogate parents’ warped lens.
When they sensed that the time was right, the hirelings and their cronies, whose nearly matched the family’s numbers, declared their intention to seize the house and reduce its original owners to peonage. Millicent zealously aided her dispossessors, even helping them set fire to Xander’s guest house. What none of them knew until too late was that the bank had cooked up a scheme with City Hall to foreclose on the house amid the tumult and rent it to the help they’d originally convinced the family to hire.
Jon, Xander, and Yves explained their family’s disgraceful impoverishment to Xander’s son Zedekiah, who’d never known the grand old house as anything but a dilapidated wreck teeming with strangers that hated him. His elders had left him with nothing to lose. Take that however you want.
