In a prior post, Stolen Youth, I talked about how young people in 2023 have lost any sense of optimism for the future. No matter how bad things seemed to be in the 1980s, we were still optimistic about the future.
I remember well what life was like in the 1980s as a high school kid. Even with the Cold War still in full swing and the threat of global thermonuclear war hanging over our heads, we were still so very optimistic. We looked forward to the future. For a high school kid in the 1980s, the future possibilities were limitless. We had fun every weekend, played sports, hung out with friends, fell in and out of love and then back in again. The music was incredible. The girls were feminine and beautiful, just discovering the power of their sexuality while at the same time remaining aloof and modest in their own way. Nobody wore sweatpants or pajamas to school. The mall was the place to hang out and no one got shot because some exuberant youths decided to shoot each other.
For the life of me I can’t remember why but my wife and I were talking about something and the topic of Beverly Hills 90210 came up. The show initially revolved around the lives of the Walsh twins, Brandon (Jason Priestley) and Brenda (Shannen Doherty), along with their rather unlikely circle of friends. For fun we re-watched the pilot episode that we had watched together on October 4th, 1990, my first year of college. It is full of things like making friends at a new school and deciding what to wear to your first day and to parties (Brenda Walsh is supposed to be a high school junior but apparently had a dizzying assortment of slinky cocktail dresses). It also deals with some serious, if slightly implausible issues, but always with an eye toward doing the right thing. The scenery and music is mostly uplifting and positive but most of all the show was fun, even when dealing with serious issues.
Fast forward to today and one of the most acclaimed shows on TV is another series about life in high school, but with a decidedly darker and malevolent atmosphere. The show is called Euphoria and runs on HBO (now “Max”). Starring the homely Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman who just goes by “Zendaya” and plays a high school girl named Rue Bennett, Euphoria is the antithesis of Beverly Hills 90210. I watched the first five minutes of the pilot and wanted to cut myself. We are introduced to Rue by her describing the trauma of being born a few days after September 11th, and as a newborn supposedly watching George W. Bush giving his famous pep talk at Ground Zero, followed by the Rue as a baby crying. Subtle! Then we see her growing older, being diagnosed with all sorts of mental illness, taking prescription drugs and then graduating to snorting coke. The filming and musical score are dark and depressing, and her self-abuse isn’t something she overcomes but rather seems inevitable.
It goes downhill from there, I tried watching a couple of episodes and it is like rubbing broken glass in your eyes. Grotesque hook-up sex, a trannie boy who hooks up (graphically) with some random adult dude, lots of drug use. There isn’t a single positive you can take away from the show. Maybe it is mildly reflective of high school life today but rather than pointing to ways to improve things, it instead wallows in depravity like a hog wallowing in shit. The summary of the first episode gives this cheery synopsis:
This is what high school age, and younger, kids are consuming. Nihilistic, depressing, dark media that doesn’t promise a brighter future but instead reaffirms that their lives suck and are only going to get worse. No wonder kids are so depressed and suicidal today.
Pop culture shapes our broader culture. White boys listen to rap and White girls twerk because that is what they see in pop culture. A huge percentage of kids think they are homosexual, or “bi”, or increasingly “transgender”, because that is what they see being exalted in pop culture. Kids that are normal are “cis-gender”, a word intended to be a slur that just means “not a sexual degenerate”. As a kid in middle and high school, calling another dude faggot was about the ugliest thing you could say. Now calling someone “cis” seems to be even worse, there is nothing more embarrassing to high school kids than being a White, non-gay/trannie guy without any oppression points.
Young people are especially susceptible to the power of suggestion in pop culture and They know this. They have been slowly rotting away what young people consume for decades to where we are today with social media and pop culture making the most cheerful of kids depressed and suicidal.
My only consolation is thinking of the time when They get the rewards for their degeneracy that They have earned.