We sure do like to bitch, don't we?
We bitch about stuff over which we have no control. Gas prices, the weather, whatever.
We bitch about friends, family, aches, homes, neighbors, and jobs.
We bitch about how much everyone else bitches.
Was it always this way, or do we somehow now feel more entitled to complain?
I hear often about the Greatest Generation. They won a War and raised families and never complained. Not once. Millions of them passed through adulthood with nary a grumble. No siree. None of them has ever been mistaken for a curmudgeon (except Rooney). Not a one. Old people are nothing if not completely contented.
OK, so maybe we aren't any worse generationally than those who came before. We have opposable thumbs; we have powers of high reasoning . . . it makes sense that bitching is also hard-wired into our DNA. Forget about Grandpa. The first Cro-Magnons probably had some complaints about their mastodon steaks.
But it does seem as though we've entered a culture of fine whine. There might be, partially, a generational explanation. Baby Boomers aren't the first to bitch but we sure have perfected it as art during our collective adolescence of unprecedented comfort and relaxed mores! We're in charge. So, as never before, the "adults" in any given space - the family, the corporation, the political process - are born bitchers.
Compounding this development is technology. Our world has shrunk. And in this compressed world two things are true. We have more contact with everyone else. And we have even more access to the public address system. The first irritates. The second gives the venters inside us an outlet. It's Bitchy Symbiosis.
Sift through the Internet sometime: see a lot of indignant outrage! Remember how Martin Luther tacked his 95 Theses to the Castle Church in Wittenberg? Flash forward 500 years. The whole world is that church door. We all have complaints. We can do better and get better. We can't believe what we hear around us, what we see. And we need to say something or something is missing.
Now we have the outlet to end them all. Everyone, please bitch.