What's wrong with you?

An R-rated rant on Gen-Z males that's not work-safe if you are using the caption reader. Some of you young guys have some work to do. And a lot of what's wrong won't just buff out.

The USS Hornet (CV-8) sailing out of San Francisco in April 1942

If you look up "badass" in the dictionary, the 82-year-old photo above goes with it. The carrier is the USS Hornet, and there are 16 modified B-25B Mitchell bombers on the ship’s flight deck. These planes were turned into winged gas cans with bombs for the purpose of attempting the first American strike on the Japanese homelands after Pearl Harbor, when American morale was low and the Axis powers seemed untouchable. This is known as the Doolittle Raid. And it’s importance to the eventual defeat of Japan in the Second World War is difficult to overestimate.

The average age of the 80 men who took part in the Doolittle Raid was 22 years old. Doolittle himself was only in his 40’s. These young men were expected to take off from a 450-foot flight deck (instead of the normal 1200-foot runway) 400 miles east of Japan, drop bombs over defended Japanese airspace without fighter escorts, then proceed to China for landings at primitive airfields. This was an audacious plan by any reckoning.

As it turned out, the Japanese discovered the carrier group 800 miles off their coast, forcing the planes to launch without enough fuel to make it to their designated Chinese airfields. Of the 16 planes, 15 crash-landed in eastern China, and one made it to an airbase in Russia, where the crew was immediately interned.

None of these 80 men were under any illusion that this was anything other than an extremely high-risk mission with little actual military value. High stakes, low odds, and the payoff was merely to poke the Japanese in the eye. Yet each of these young men volunteered for the mission. That’s as good of a definition of a badass as I can come up with.

Now, contrast this with the large number of whiny 22-year-old males of the 21st century who can’t seem to find their way from their heads to their asses with their hands, need safe spaces from microaggressions to make it from latte to latte, and can't decide whether to compete in men's or women's sports.

What in the hell is wrong with you? Actually, that’s rhetorical. Let me explain what’s wrong with you. The dumbassery among you is strong.

The young men who flew with Doolittle were raised in a time when personal responsibility and accountability were things. Get too out of line growing up, and the result was likely a consequence that you probably would not like. You learned from that. These young men were raised in a society that taught the importance of courage, sacrifice, hard work, and discipline.

When the shadows fell during the dark days of the early 1940’s, these young men answered the call to protect their families, neighbors, and the country as a whole. They all understood that some things were more important than what they, personally, might have wanted. They understood the concepts of courage and sacrifice. It doesn’t mean that it was easy for them, but they got it.

Were these men perfect? No, they were not. Racism, sexism, and many other social pathologies were prevalent in the societies that produced them. But when they returned home from the horrors of the Second World War, they set about remaking America into a much better place. We owe not only our freedom but a lot of the social and economic progress we’ve made in this country in the last 80 years to the greatest generation.

These days, courage, responsibility, accountability, work ethic, and the entire concept of sacrifice are beyond the comprehension of a large portion of 22-year-old males. Responsibility is just too hard. Accountability? What’s that? Consequence? Anathema. To have a work ethic, you’d first have to discover work. One is unlikely to adapt to discipline when they are discovering it for the first time as an adult. And courage? Hell, you can forget about that. Some of you are the wimpiest dipshits that bad dreams are capable of conjuring.

To be perfectly clear, this rant is not directed at all young men. Probably not even most young men. I know a lot of young guys who are not only the salt of the freaking earth but stout units who are my betters in most significant ways. I’m often impressed by the likes of you, and if it were just the likes of you, I’d feel like I was leaving the world in good hands.

But a significant number of contemporary 20-something young men are nearly a complete waste of skin: lackadaisical, soft, undisciplined, unskilled, and lost in terms of being a man. Help does not appear to be on the way.

It’s this particular cohort that I’m addressing. None of you are even remotely qualified to carry any of Doolittle’s Raiders jock straps to the washing machine.

To wit: I just reviewed Ring doorbell camera footage from a few days ago of a young delivery driver who was supposed to deliver a time-sensitive package to my home. He walked up to the delivery box on my front porch and, without ringing the bell, posted a failed delivery notice (signature required) on my front door. By the time I reached the front door, he was gone. I signed for the package in the space provided on the back of the note and accepted the fact that the package was going to be a day late. The next day, he ignored the signed note and did the same thing.

When I called to complain, I had the most remarkable conversation with his supervisor, who explained to me that the reason it’s not uncommon for me to find packages out in the bushes by the road instead of in my well-marked delivery box and that the driver this time didn’t bother to ring the obvious doorbell 4 inches from where he placed the failed delivery notice was simply because he didn’t give a shit. The driver is paid the same whether he rings the doorbell or not. And if they fire him, they end up spending a few months training a replacement who’s unlikely to be much better.

Having heard that I called to complain, the third day he ran up to the house, dropped the package, rang the doorbell, and sprinted back to the van in what appeared to be about a 4.1 40 so that he wouldn’t have to face the music.

This is one of the consequences of raising a generation on timeouts instead of “just wait until your father gets home.” Being lazy, useless, and minimally employable is no way to go through life. Snap out of it.

It gets worse. I’ve recently been astonished to discover the “incel” young male subculture. Incel, for those who may not know, stands for “involuntary celibate.” Given human biology, it’s one of the dumbest things that I can think of. The only reason that it’s not the dumbest thing that I can think of is that first place is occupied by the growing number of young men who think that by putting on wigs, lots of makeup, and fake boobs, they can become women. Or that because they feel female inside, they should sign up for women’s sports.

Incels first. Meeting girls is easy. It's so easy that it’s tempting just to laugh at your dumb asses. But I’d rather light a candle than curse your darkness. So here’s how to get across with the opposite sex. I will, in the interest of clarity for short attention spans, relay this information to you in a series of short, easy steps.

1. Turn off your fucking computer.

2. Leave your mom’s basement.

3. Go anywhere there are girls your age.

4. Say these words exactly: “Hello, my name is .” Your name goes in the blank space.

Most unattached women really like to meet unattached men. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. You don’t have to be particularly handsome, bright, or wealthy if you are courteous, pleasant, even moderately interesting, and polite. Manners will get you much farther than a Lamborghini. Mind you, this formula does not always work because some women are crazy as hell—at least as much as some of you. But they self-identify pretty readily, and with a bit of practice, you can learn to avoid all but the most devious and clever of them.

Now, as for you guys who imagine that you’d feel better as a woman, go knock yourself out. As an adult, if that’s what makes you happy, go for it. I think that it’s weird that most guys who want to be women transform into a fetishized version of a woman, but there’s no accounting for taste. At any rate, it’s up to you. Just knock it off with that “lactating person” bullshit.

Here’s where I draw the line. When you decide that, at 6’2” and 200 lbs, you want to compete on, say, the girls volleyball team and have the right to flash your junk around in their locker room, you’d just better hope my daughter isn’t on that team, or you’ll have, I assure you, a problem that you can’t handle.

When I was young, I wanted to stand on the shoulders of the men that came before me. I wanted to learn from their good examples and from their mistakes to become better. I wanted to work harder, be smarter, and get further in life because they worked so hard to set me up for success. I wanted a good job, a family, and to make the world better for my presence. I wanted my forebears to be proud of me. It would have been letting them down to fail in any of that.

Not only have some of you knuckleheads let down the heroes of the greatest generation who sacrificed so much to make the world a much better place than you deserve, you’ve managed to betray even the legacy of Peewee Herman.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.