The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Live Like a Millennial Hipster …

Posted on | August 19, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

. . . die like a Millennial hipster:

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, both 29, last year quit their office jobs in Washington, DC, to embark on the journey. Austin, who worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, who worked in the Georgetown University admissions office, decided that they’re were wasting their lives working.
“I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” Austin wrote on his blog before he quit. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”
The couple documented their year-long journey on Instagram and on a joint blog. As The New York Times put it, they shared “the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.”
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Austin wrote. 
“People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.”
“I don’t buy it,” he continued. “Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.”
However, Austin and Geoghegan’s dream trip came to a tragic and gruesome end when they got to Tajikistan, a weak state with a known terrorist threat that shares a border with Afghanistan, where ISIS and other terrorist groups are highly active. They were riding their bikes through the country on July 29 when a car rammed them, according to CBS News. Five men got out of the car and stabbed the couple to death along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands. 
Two days later, ISIS released a video showing the same men sitting in front of the group’s black flag. They looked at the camera and vowed to kill “disbelievers,” according to The New York Times.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Jay Austin had a master’s degree from Georgetown University, a nominally Catholic school where one might think someone would have taught him that evil is more than “a make-believe concept.” But all the money spent educating Austin and his girlfriend was wasted, as they learned nothing that might have helped them survive in a world where evil does, in fact, exist. Instead, they believed the treacly popular nonsense of dumbed-down Buddhism — all that stuff about life as the enjoyment of sunsets, thunderstorms and gentle breezes — that proliferates on the Internet.

Notice that this young couple were childless? Yeah, childlessness is part of the same cluster of values that defines the Millennial hipster lifestyle. They don’t want to have kids, they want to be kids. Childlessness enables childishness, but they rationalize this as a humanitarian do-gooder project by telling themselves that overpopulation causes global warming. They strive to avoid adult responsibilities as long as possible, so they go to grad school — a master’s degree gives you an excuse to postpone adulthood until you’re 25 or 26 — and they want life to be an endless vacation. “Let’s ride our bicycles around the world!” is the perfect Millennial hipster idea, especially when undertaken with the noble-sounding goal of proving that evil doesn’t exist and that your “fellow human beings” around the world are “wonderful and kind,” despite “holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.”

Indeed, the “values and beliefs and perspectives” of Tajikistan are different. The total fertility rate (TFR, average lifetime births per woman) in Tajikistan is 2.63, ranking 72nd in the world, according to the CIA. Women in Tajikistan have more babies than women in Bolivia or Botswana, and about 40% more babies than are born to the average woman in the U.S., where the TFR of 1.87 ranks 143rd in the world.

The total fertility rate of Lauren Geoghegan, of course, was zero. There will be no grandchildren for her parents, as is the case for so many Boomers who have indulged their offspring by sending them off to prestigious universities where they absorb the Mlllennial hipster worldview. To live a regular life, according to the hipster, is to waste one’s life “in swaths of grey and beige,” when instead you could be enjoying picturesque sunsets while biking across Tajikistan. Until you discover — alas, too late! — that evil is not a “make-believe concept,” and that maybe staying home would have been a better idea.



 

Category: Terrorism

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One Response to “Live Like a Millennial Hipster …”

  1. FMJRA 2.0: Day Late & A Dollar Short : The Other McCain
    August 26th, 2018 @ 10:45 pm

    […] Live Like a Millennial Hipster… EBL […]