Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War by Peachy Keenan

Author:Peachy Keenan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Raised by Wolves

Generation X remains the most together and stable of the post-boomer generations. We managed to put together lives that pretty much resemble our parents’, only with smaller houses and a lot less dough. Until college, the only electronic gadgets we had access to were landline phones and VCRs. But despite our blissful lack of social media, we had our own issues. Baby boomers were the first wave of American parents who thought it would be cool to take their hands off the parental steering wheel. The repercussions were immediate.

I was lucky to have had a present and loving mother, but my father was a workaholic professional who had mostly checked out by the time I was twelve. My childhood was notable for his frequent absences. Without any rules in my life or a strong father figure, pop culture and media filled the gaps. Director John Hughes and late-night TV host David Letterman became my real dads.

I don’t think I even met a devout member of any religion during my childhood; “religion” simply didn’t exist in my world. Every bat mitzvah and WASP cotillion I attended was an ocean of secular atheists. Over time, like an anchor collecting rust, I collected every bad mainstream feminist rule of living. This received wisdom was uncontested; you didn’t even think about it. You simply believed.

My peers and I had also grossly misunderstood the Thoreau we read and internalized in tenth-grade English class. When Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,”2 we took this as a call to arms. We were going to the woods, too!

Instead of the woods, however (ew, bugs), we went to the clubs, the frat parties, and the big cities. We got fake IDs. We were going to live deep. That was our transcendentalism: to transcend the “boredom” of normal suburban childhood into rollicking young adulthoods.

Which meant that from age sixteen and up, my secular, “sophisticated,” “educated” friends and I ran a terrifying gauntlet while our clueless, divorced parents left us completely alone. We had a lot of fun, yes, but all around me, people were getting hit with cultural shrapnel, their psyches shredded, medics choppering in to rescue them from themselves. Friends endured addiction, near-fatal ODs, date rape, repeated heartbreak, and attempted suicide. My younger siblings lost a handful of their classmates to fatal overdoses and actual suicides. I’m sure many people who have gone to progressive private schools—or any secular schools, for that matter—have similar stories. It was like the HBO show Euphoria, only without the cell phones.

No adults seemed to notice we were going a little wild. We whined about it less, I guess. Who would we have whined to? We didn’t have the Internet or social media, and our parents were none the wiser.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.