RULE 17

Your parents weren’t as boring before you were born as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, driving you around, saving for your education, cleaning up your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are.

And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

And, yes, it is more than a little ironic to be lectured about the assault on the pristine purity of nature by idealists whose various appendages are tattooed and pierced in ways that nature likely did not intend.

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This is what the creators of South Park would call a “smug alert”: your assumption that because you made dioramas about greenhouse gas emissions, you have a moral leg up on your parents, who actually went to work, saved, invested, and supported their families and now have to spend their most productive years nagging you. This includes asking where you are going and whom you are going with, and other stuff that makes them seem like stuffed shirts from the last century.

If they are annoying you by asking these questions, deal with it. They have to think about what kind of a person you will be when you are twenty-five, or whether you’ll even make it to that age. Someday you’ll understand and maybe even be a little grateful. If they aren’t asking you, someday you’ll wonder why they weren’t.

As for your superior idealism: nothing is easier than feeling idealistic without actually having to do anything at all. Unfortunately, a bad mood and a desire to piss off your parents are not the same thing as idealism, and they don’t save the planet.

“Fretting makes us important,” P. J. O’Rourke remarked in All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty.

Say you’re an adult male and you’re skipping down the street whistling “Last Train to Clarksville.” People will call you a fool. But lean over to the person next to you on a subway and say, “How can you smile while innocents are dying in Tibet?” You’ll acquire a reputation for great seriousness and also more room to sit down.…

And worrying is less work than doing something to fix the worry. This is especially true if we’re careful to pick the biggest possible problems to worry about. Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.83

This is the sort of attitude that explains the protestors who carried signs reading, STOP THE COMMODIFICATION OF WATER at a rally where, O’Rourke noted, “almost everyone was carrying a brand-named bottle of same.”84 Or the kid who wanted to make a bold statement against the corporate world by waving an American flag with all the stars replaced by corporate logos—but who was wearing shoes made by Adidas, and carrying a Mountainsmith backpack and a Swiss army watch. This would be the same demonstration where protestors carried VISUALIZE FUEL-EFFICIENT VEHICLES signs a few yards from the dozens of charter buses hired to carry the idealists to and from the event.85

Last year The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story86 asking:

Can a hipster t-shirt be as incendiary as a rock anthem?

Is a cool logo some kind of manifesto?

Does shopping for weird new stuff make you subversive?

The short answer: no.

The same goes for wearing a “Che” T-shirt you bought at the mall: it doesn’t make you a revolutionary, or even especially cutting-edge. The guy’s been dead for, what, fifty years?

You want cosmic justice? An equitable, fair world, where all wrongs are righted? Where the idle rich pay reparations? Where victims get their just due?

Go out and make enough money to buy your parents a new house.