Sorry we f*cked up, kid

An essay about talking to my mom, school shootings, generational strife, Everything Everywhere All at Once, apologies, and the judgement of history

[Writer’s note: Today’s post isn’t funny. This post is a serious essay about the serious topic of school shootings. I hope it’ll make you think and feel the feels, as the kids say, but it won’t make you laugh. Sorry. If you came here to laugh, I think you’ll enjoy this very silly piece I wrote last March called “The Case of The Missing Laptop.” Read it here.]

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

My mom called me on Wednesday night. She’s been trying to get better at reaching out on the regular, and I’ve been trying to encourage her. Like everything else in this world, our relationship is a work in progress.

“Can you talk right now?” Mom asked. “Are you free?”

“Sure, it’s a good time.”

I switched to my earbuds and plopped down on the couch. Mortimer curled up next to me. For a few minutes, Mom and I went through the preliminaries.

• Are you good?✅

• Is Christina good?✅

• Is Mortimer good?✅

Then Mom got the reason for her call.

“I woke up this morning, and I felt like I needed to call you today,” she began. “Have you been following the news about the school shooting in a Tennessee?”

I had been following the news, which is to say that I saw the headlines and felt that awful feeling everyone gets when the same horror show keeps running on an endless loop. But I didn’t click the links, or turn on cable news, or dive into the social media shit show. I already knew the story, and I already knew what everyone was going to say, and worst of all, I already knew nothing would change.

“Yeah, it’s awful news,” I said.

“Horrible. And it keeps happening. What’s the expression? Same shit, different day. That’s what if feels like. I feel like we’re living in a nightmare.”

For a few minutes, we said all the usual things Americans always say after a school shooting. But there’s only so much mileage you can get out of the usual talking points, and when those talking points bounce around an echo chamber, they don’t go anywhere at all. Maybe that’s why Mom and I eventually got around to acknowledging that our words were as empty as the promises American politicians have been making about this issue for decades.

“I remember the first time this happened,” Mom said. “You were away at college.”

“I remember Columbine,” I said. “It felt horrific, but I don’t think anyone felt numb to it in those days.”

“No, no. We couldn’t be numb back then. It wasn’t normal back then. This kind of shit had never happened before.”

“Columbine wasn’t the first school shooting, Mom.”

“It wasn’t?”

Here, my knowledge of pop music came in handy, in a macabre sort of way. I recalled the shooting at an elementary school in San Diego that inspired the song I Don’t Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats. I wasn’t quite two years young when a 16-year-old murdered two people and injured nine others at Grover Cleveland Elementary. Then there’s The Ballad of Charles Whitman by Kinky Friedman. That song tells the story of the Texas Tower Shooting, where Whitman, a former Marine, killed 14 people and wounded 31 others on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. That shooting, which is also referenced with Kubrickian gallows humor in the film Full Metal Jacket, occurred in 1966, eleven years before I was born. History may have recorded earlier school shootings, but as far as I know, there aren’t any other twentieth century pop songs about the subject. Come to think of it, I don’t know any 21st century pop songs about school shootings, but artists are always working hard to make sense of the world, especially the painful parts, so there must be plenty of contemporary school shooting songs I’m just not aware of.

“I just don’t understand is a society that won’t do anything to protect its children,” I said. “I don’t know what it says about us, but it doesn’t say anything good.”

“That’s why I called,” Mom said. “I feel so terrible about this. I needed to hear your voice.”

“I’m glad you called. We need to talk with our loved ones about these things. It’s important to bear witness.”

To some, that last comment about bearing witness may sound incongruous with the dude who chose not to click the link, or turn on the news, or dive into the social media shit show. But I don’t see it that way. There’s a fine line between staying informed and going off the deep end. If you can manage to stay on the right side of that line—never easy—you remain open to deeper conversations, even when—and maybe especially when—talking feels like it won’t accomplish anything. Those kinds conversations matter, not because any single conversation changes the world, but because history has far too many examples of societies where countless individuals failed to bear witness to the horrors their society perpetrated.

“I’m sorry to say that between school shootings, and the environment, and all the other mishigas going on these days, my generation is really leaving you guys a shitty world. It’s fucked, Michael. Really fucked. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t expect my mother to apologize for the state of the world, but as a younger member of the Generation X cohort, I get the sense that people my age and younger have been waiting for a generational apology that’ll probably never come. Our hunger for an apology—personal, or generational, or both—probably lurks somewhere in the hurt feelings that are masked by the anger—both righteous and outrageous—that fuels the generational shit-posting that’s epitomized by the OK Boomer meme. Because if you need an apology, and you know you’re not going to get one, clapping back can be comforting, even if the comfort is cold and anything that looks like healing or progress remains elusive. Not that I’m a psychologist, or even a guy who took a psych class in college (I didn’t). I’m just a dude who writes funny stories about his life for the internet. So what do I know?

When my Mom visited us in March, we watched The Academy Awards together. I can’t be sure of my exact age, but I think I was a teenager the last time I watched The Academy Awards with my mom. Back then, watching the show was personal because my father did the sound. In addition to rooting for whatever film happened to be my favorite that year, I rooted for good audio.

These days, I don’t really care who wins an Oscar. I still listen carefully, mostly for the jokes, and I still root for good audio because good audio reminds me of my dad, who I miss every single day. Also, if you can’t hear the speeches, how do you know what to Tweet in the culture war? Audio matters, even if the things people say into the microphone are counterproductive.

Anyway, this year our living room hosted a low-key skirmish in the larger intergenerational war I mentioned in the previous section. Mom rooted for Elvis because he was The King, at least as far as the Boomers are concerned. A biopic about Elvis probably made Mom feel nostalgic for a time when she was young and the world was her generation’s oyster. (When I’m my mom’s age, I’ll probably feel the same way about a Nirvana movie, but if that movie is going to be an honest telling of what it felt like to be young in the 1990s, it’ll probably be a bummer with a kickass soundtrack.)

Christina rooted for Everything Everywhere All at Once, a really complicated film that uses the multiverse and an IRS tax audit to explore themes of immigrant identity narratives, queer identity, and inter-generational trauma. Mom hadn’t seen Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the more we tried to explain it to her, the more I felt like she’d never understand.

Spoiler alert: Everything Everywhere All at Once beat out Elvis and some other good films. It won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, and three out of the four best acting awards. If the 95th Academy Awards show was a contest between Boomers and Millennials, the Millennials kicked ass and took the only name that matters: Oscar. Christina was thrilled, Mom not so much.

The Tuesday following The Academy Awards, I drove Mom back to her place in Las Vegas. We talked about a lot of stuff on the drive, and at one point I tried to explain why so many people, especially young people, were so excited that Everything Everywhere All at Once had won so many Oscars. Mom didn’t really get it, but to be honest, I don’t know if I really understood it either.

The day after I flew back to Los Angeles, Christina shared a link to a Vox article in a group chat we have going with my sister, Allison, and her partner, Craig. In an article called Hollywood’s hot new trend: Parents who say they’re sorry, writer Emily St. James argued that Everything Everywhere All at Once falls into a “suddenly popular sub-genre” she calls “the Millennial parental apology fantasy.” Other examples of the sub-genre include Turning Red, Encanto, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Here’s how St. James explains the narratives that define this sub-genre:

Instead of telling the time-honored story of a child learning just how much their parent has sacrificed for them, these stories tell its mirror image. Instead, they are stories where the parent has to realize how badly they’ve treated their child. The ability to heal intergenerational trauma lies at least in part with that parent, and as the film wraps up, they take real steps to doing so, usually as the child realizes that the trauma did not originate with their parent but much further up the family tree. Better able to understand each other, the parent and child end the film with a better relationship.

A little later in the piece, St. James adds key details about the exact nature of the fantasy explored in the millennial parental apology fantasy sub-genre:

The fantasy here is not just that a parent will apologize to their child (though that is key) but also that said apology will snap the cycle of abuse so it no longer perpetuates itself. And that’s a fantasy that has appeal to the parent and the child.”

According to St. James, one possible explanation for the sudden emergence of the Millennial parental apology fantasy is the fact that Millennials are starting to have kids, and Millennial audiences are therefore hungry for new takes on old themes like parenting and generational trauma. Hollywood is nothing if not a machine for monetizing cultural trends.

But labor also tells the story behind the emergence of Millennial parental apology fantasy sub-genre. As Boomer filmmakers exit the stage, they’re largely being replaced, not by Xers—a relatively small cohort that began to reach adulthood in the 1980s and made its cinematic mark in the 1990s with films like Clerks, Office Space, and Reality Bites—but by Millennials, who like the Boomers, understand that there’s strength in numbers. Regardless of the reason, Millennial filmmakers have arrived, and if films like Everything Everywhere All at Once are any indication, we’re going to see more tellings of the Millennial parental apology fantasy.

I didn’t mention the Vox article to my mom on our call. For all I know, she’s never even heard of Vox, a digital media company that launched in 2011 with the idea of rebooting news, culture, and just about every other advertiser-friendly content vertical, for the Millennial generation. Instead of talking about the Millennial parental apology fantasy, or Everything Everywhere All at Once, or even the endless cycle of gun violence that hangs over American life, I asked Mom how she thought history would judge her generation.

“Hopefully, history will say we did the best we could,” she said. “But I kind of doubt it. I don’t think history will be kind to us.”

“History is a lot of things, but kind isn’t one of them.”

Reading history is a passion of mine. My mom was the first person to encourage this passion. Thanks to her, I’ve had my nose buried in one history book or another ever since I was a kid. I’m not a professional historian, or even an amateur historian, but I think about history a lot, and on occasion, I’ve been known to use Situation Normal to interrogate the past generally and my mother specifically.

“I don’t think history will judge my generation any better than your generation,” I said.

“You don’t?”

Mom sounded surprised by my comment, but maybe that’s because my generation and the generations that came after mine have made so much hay out of blaming her generation. These days, it’s de rigueur to blame Boomers, but like all trends, blaming Boomers will grow stale, and ultimately, age poorly for anyone who was once on trend.

“I think the people out there with pitchforks for Boomers will be old before they know it,” I said. “You’ll be gone by then, but with any luck I’ll still be here, and I’m sure the kids will want to know why we fucked up so badly.”

“What a fucking mess,” Mom said.

“That’s history for you, Mom. A total fucking mess.”

Usually, this is part of an essay where the writer shares what they’ve learned—a lesson the reader can take with them to share at cocktail parties where serious people discuss serious things, before they they go to work the next day at jobs where they’re tasked with implementing serious answers to the serious questions of the day. But I suppose that’s a writerly fantasy as wild as the Millennial parental apology fantasy. Maybe wilder, actually.

The thing is, I don’t have a lesson to share here. I don’t have an answer that would make today’s kids as safe in their schools as I was in mine. Hell, I can’t even explain why it is that our society continues to accept dead children as the price for our dysfunction.

The truth is, I’m as lost as any adult reading this essay. But at least I know I’m lost, and maybe that counts for something. Maybe. Because one day, sooner than the Xers, the Millennials, and even the Zoomers realize, we’ll be old, just like the Boomers are now. And when we’re old, tomorrow’s young people will hold us accountable in ways that are fair and unfair. The only question is: will they accept our apology?

Let’s talk

Usually, this is the part of the post where the situation normies gather to have a fun discussion, but today’s post isn’t fun. Also, I’m afraid that the comments section will turn into a talking points shit show. So please, let’s not do that. Instead, let’s talk about the following questions:

1. What does it mean to you to bear witness?

2. Whatever your politics are, the news can be really depressing. What do you do to stay informed while protecting your mental health?

3. When was the last time you talked with a loved one about a news story that really upset you? Did it help?

4. What are some of your favorite history books? And how does reading history make you feel about the world we live in?