I recently spent some time in Atlantic City. While at the Borgata, I watched a few of the in-house comedians that rotate in and out of the club. These guys and gals were definitely members of The Old Guard. They spoke without a filter and nearly all of them mocked "PC culture" in one way or another. To see a comedian live is to depart from the squeaky clean versions of comedy we see on TV, or even during Netflix stand up specials.
The audience, being mostly comprised of people aged 50 and older, would cheer at jokes the (few) younger audience members cringed at. Some of them, admittedly, were cringe-worthy, but most of them sounded like exacerbated versions of things my conservative family says. The comedy atmosphere I experienced is an example of the profound difference between young and old generations in the United States.
Comedians have been scrutinized more than the president, as of late, and the outcry they receive doesn't make sense to them, or older generations. As I heard someone once word it, "they were the generation that got beaten by their parents and survived." Current twenty-somethings, however, don't have an up close and personal relationship with violence, if they're lucky. This realization has made me start to wonder if my generation is ill-equipped to deal with violence and controversy, because it is seen as something negative instead of persistent. Now, clearly, a world without violence is a good thing, but it's starting to seem unrealistic to be unable to talk about these things.
To avoid getting into a discussion about violence, I do want to point out the disparity in views about violence could be the reason that the generation gap is so real and persistent in America today. What I realized as those comedians stood on stage and the audience laughed, is that there is a huge cultural gap between the core base that support Republican politics (50+ year olds) and those deemed "millennials" by the media.
This cultural gap is driving a lot of the violent feelings Americans have towards each other because we are treating the American culture as homogeneous. "Everyone should be this way because it is the human way" is not the way a millennial would think when traveling to another country. In fact, we might even make excuses for them in very patriarchal cultures because of the fact it is another culture. This idea is highly accepted among American society, but we can't practice it with each other.
The problem is, older generations grew up in a completely different world. As a result, their ideas about how the world works are completely different. If more people would see that and try to reach across the generational "border," I'm sure we would find much more in common with each other than our differences.
Everyone wants to be happy and everyone wants to survive. Even if that way of surviving seems horribly violent (among other things), how will anyone be able to change if they don't try to understand each other first?
