Generation Z is weird about cars but I’m totally normal
In what should be an epochal household shift, my son got his driver’s license a few weeks ago. This culminated months of begrudging participation in one of the main rituals of American young-adulthood. He didn’t really want to do it. Some of this resistance was on principle. He’s the president of the Public Transit Club at his high school. But there was also generational ennui. Apparently the Zoomers just aren’t that into driving.
“Look,” I said, after his sixteenth birthday, “you live in California. You need to know how to operate a motor vehicle.” After all, reliable public transit only exists in tiny, Marxist enclaves where public services haven’t been repudiated as against the natural, Hobbesian order of American society.
I also said that, since he lives in the United States of America, where the sweet lord Jesus wants everyone armed to the eyeballs with military-grade weaponry, he also needs to know how to safely unload a firearm, should he encounter one. But first, driving.
My son is thoughtful and careful behind the wheel. He easily passed the road test and now he is a licensed driver. But he has yet to ask to use the car. To a Gen-X father, this is deeply weird, and it makes me want to search his room for drugs (not a chance) and anarchist literature (maybe?).
Imagethief 