These changes are permanent
Today's Tom Sawyer is much more meta than the past ones
In the last week of 2025, I am focusing on themes from the year. Sunday’s piece kicked it off with a riff on AI, God, and the epistemology of our meta culture. This has also kind of come together, as I write it, around my bucket list for 2026: RUSH is touring for the first time in over a decade, and I am counting the days until they come through Atlanta. You’ll see the imagery peppered throughout.
“No, his mind is not for rent / To any god or government / Always hopeful, yet discontent / He knows changes aren’t permanent But change is.” This is a famous lyric from the RUSH song “Tom Sawyer,” and I think 2025 has smashed it to bits for the current generation.
When I first moved to north metro Atlanta from central Georgia, my kids were barely in elementary school. I covered the 2016 New Hampshire primary for Decision Desk HQ from the place I grew up, and noticed the wave of older people excited to cast their votes for Donald J. Trump. This included many registered Democrats who could find no good reason to vote for Hillary Clinton, and countless reasons to reject her imperial coronation as the nominee.
I also covered the Georgia primary; little did I know that in less then two years, I’d be voting in the same polling place I covered, and my kids would be attending the middle school where I checked results. Life is funny that way. I burned my 2016 GOP delegate credentials rather than participate in the Trump show. But I woke my wife up at 1:30am on November 9th, 2016 to tell her that Trump had won.
The folks of my generation, which is somewhere between the end of the Boomers and the ascension of the Gen-Xers, went through these events believing that change is the only constant, and events can be outlasted because changes aren’t permanent.
But my kids have really only known 10 years of Trump and MAGA. Kids graduating college in 2025 were in elementary school when Trump first descended the golden elevator at Trump Tower. They have only vague memories of Barack Obama, and only caricatures of Bill Clinton, along with their parents’ opinions of Hillary. The Bushes are war presidents for the history books, and Jimmy Carter was an old man who they watched as he died slowly.
I remember Ronald Reagan and the end of the Soviet Union. I was at the Newington Mall in September of 1983 when the alert buses pulled up and all the airmen piled in. The world nearly perished in nuclear annihilation. I remember the Gulf War in 1991. One of my more frightening memories was cresting a hill on Route 1 in coastal New Hampshire, an A-10 in the rear view mirror lining up the GAU-8 Avenger cannon on me (you’d nearly soil yourself too). I was told they did practice runs on vehicles before jumping off for the hop over the Atlantic. In Iraq, if you saw that, it was the last thing you saw in this world.
My wife and I remember September 11, 2001. My kids have none of those memories. They know about the War on Terror, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, from (I was going to write “books”) the Internet. They know that we didn’t really win either war.
I experienced the culture wars as I became more political—and conservative—focused on gay marriage, abortion, and the role of Christians in ethical government. Conservatism meant a smaller federal government, smaller entitlements, more trade, less debt, and fiscal policies that encouraged savings, home ownership, and social cooperation in a pluralistic, liberty-minded nation.
Our kids grew up with LGBT baked in; they roll their eyes when either side of the battle force feeds a position down the public’s throats. If I might make an ill-advised aside on season 5 of “Stranger Things”: if in real life, Will Byers spent 20 minutes coming out to his closest friends in high drama, their answer would be nothing more than, “so what?” and “we’ve known for a long time,” and that would be the end of it. Transgender is familiar, not “drag queen.” If you want to talk weird stuff to the current generation, your starting place is Furries, not trans. (If you don’t know, don’t ask, and I’m not going to link it for you, out of my own concern for you.)
They’ve grown up with teen sex on the decline, and porn viewing on a stratospheric rise. Not only porn older guys knew, like Playboy magazine, and pay-to-view hotel stuff, or “Skinemax”, but theirs is hard-core, violent, and nonstop. The younger generation has peppered me with words I didn’t know existed, and could not have existed without the massive content they have available through smartphones and the Internet (“gooning” is one example—look it up at your own peril). They’ve grown up with abortion less of an issue about life, and more about family and parents navigating a cold, hard world. They’ve not known a world without Plan B, so the image of the lonely girl waiting in the clinic, while her no-show boyfriend forgets about her (remember “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”) is not so ingrained as it is with my generation.
In their America, gargantuan federal debt is the norm. “Trillion” is not a world that gives them gooseflesh or even raises an eyebrow. Government shutdowns are not to be feared because they’re barely noticed, even for a month, even for families who rely on SNAP or school lunch payments. Fiscal responsibility is a fart in the wind.
College is for everyone, but so is crushing school loan debt, something that I never really knew. I, like many in my generation, had college loans, but they were on the order of maybe $10,000, and paid off fairly simply over years. My kids will either attend a state school (Georgia has the HOPE scholarship), or they will be paying off their loans for half their working lives—a tax on success for those whose families don’t have a lot of wealth. Or maybe they’ll be fortunate and receive scholarships.
The global and environmental issues I grew up with: nuclear plant meltdown fears (mostly unfounded, though Chernobyl was indeed terrible), Malthusian shortages and the “population bomb,” depletion of the ozone layer, oil spills; these are by the wayside. The new issues are global warming, which has been pounded into every child’s head as indisputable fact for several decades, microplastics, and autism. Many moms would trade avoiding autism for the ravages of measles, or the lifelong health problems brought by hepatitis. To me, anti-vaxxers are in the same category as “no nukes” hippies; young, dumb, and looking for a cause. What passes for autism today, we’d have called “socially awkward” in my growing-up years. I’m sure I have a touch of Asperger’s in me somewhere, and of course, I got all the requisite child vaccines.
Skepticism is rampant because the Internet mixes large-scale weaponized commentaries, memes, and conspiracy theories together with ethically challenged hucksters out there looking for a buck. It’s not content that’s rewarded with cash, it’s virality. This has led many who make their living online to pursue lies, until it’s hard to determine what’s not a lie. I still can’t get over people who seriously doubt such events as a moon landings.
But the biggest permanent deformation of our truth landscape, I think has to be COVID-19. I didn’t grow up in a world where several years of my school life was interrupted by masks, social distancing, health czars with incredible power, and daily updates from the White House. I didn’t grow up with my elders confined in virtual prisons, in assisted living and nursing home facilities; to watch them die alone.
I didn’t grow up being gaslit about the source of the virus, by all sides of the political spectrum (though I saw it happen before my own eyes). I didn’t grow up being gaslit about the countermeasures required, as the political elite gathered for lavish parties, the President of the United States hosted a superspreader event in the White House Rose Garden, churches were shuttered but Black Lives Matter protests were encouraged. I experienced these things but knew them for what they were.
It’s not that others in my generation didn’t experience issues—Black kids and busing, integration, and outright racism—it’s that COVID-19 is a common experience that affected everyone growing up in the late 2010s. Many of us were trained to trust government, or at least trust authority. These kids grew up with a giant stripe of skepticism baked in. Everything is meta, in that there’s some algorithm, or formula, or not-so-hidden motive behind it, to them.
Their memes as just as stupid as our pet rocks and mood rings, but they’ve got a velocity no other generation can match. Plus, in “my day,” the most you could spend on fads was maybe a paycheck from a grocery store job. Now, you can go all in for thousands with RobinHood for a viral crypto, or stock (think GameStop).
Nothing is safe: sports gambling and bookmaking isn’t simply legal, it’s encouraged. Social isolation isn’t a problem to be grappled with, it’s a feature, to go to a party or gathering where nobody looks up from their phones.
My generation seeks to pass down five things: competency, music, fashion, literature, and knowledge, using wealth and opportunity as the vehicles. But apart from the one-percenters, most families can barely see past their own retirement. Kids today have to make it on their own, and the path to homeownership, career, and stability is fraught with danger and fear. No wonder young people put off marriage and kids.
The year 2025 has sealed many of the broken things of the past into a new landscape, and I don’t think the changes are temporary. I do think many of these things are permanent, at least for a lifetime. In the generation who grew up in the 70s and 80s like mine, we remember the old folks who lived for thrift, because they’d seen the Great Depression and the wars. They didn’t outlive those changes, but the fruit of their thrift and conservative values (not Republican, mind you, my family were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats) brought success for us. Our choices, combined with the world our kids experience, will not bring the kind of opportunities we had, nor will it foster the kind of trust in institutions we enjoyed.
Our kids are going to have to go it alone, in so many ways. Today’s Tom Sawyer has already had his mind rented, splintered to many gods and governments. Rarely hopeful, always discontent. He knows changes are permanent, as well as change itself. The old ways are blown to bits. It’s time to build anew, if we, in our last gasp of power, can stop ourselves from burning it all down in 2026.
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