Did you ever get fired? Your faithful correspondent did, and from my first job aside from a paper route. At 15 I got hired at Kaybee Toys (remember?) to stock shelves and run the register. The dress code required ties for men, and I didn’t have any extra money to buy one, so I showed up at work without a tie.
My boss told me I needed one. I decided to get an attitude and tell him it was unfair because I didn’t have any money yet and maybe they should provide one. He told me to get my jacket out of the locker room and punch out for the last time. I did what most people in those days did after getting fired–I felt like a fool and went to nurse my wounds in private vowing never to be such an idiot again.
What people didn’t do was a) cry in public b) definitely didn’t cry in public if they were full grown-ups, not kids c) complain on social media about how it wasn’t “fair” to get fired d) talk to reporters about getting fired. Boy, have times changed. The infantilization of American “adults” has been clipping along for at least 20 years. What started “innocently” with 30-year-olds putting their “Harry Potter House” affiliation on their Twitter profiles has ended up just where we grown-ups always knew it would.
America is a nation of emotionally stunted children walking around in adult bodies. The behavior of the average 30-year-old in 2025 is what we would have expected at 17 in the 80s and 90s.
The mass outcry—complete with actual tears—over the Trump administration’s firing of government staff it believes are duplicative and unnecessary is a public tantrum we’ve never seen before. It’s become clear that federal employees really do believe they’re entitled to a government job. Leftist media like NPR is, of course, supremely sympathetic, eagerly reporting on every fired worker who got his job back after complaining to some board, or some court.
But what of the staff themselves? It’s not all of them, of course, but some of the allegedly fully grown federal employees are talking to reporters about how they’ve lost faith in America the country. . .because they lost their jobs. The level of immature emotion, indignation, and exaggerating their unfortunate but personal troubles into a harbinger of a failed nation is something to behold.
Check out the first woman in this clip posted on Twitter/X by Collin Rugg. She says, “I have cried every day. I think that that’s normal. I have a 15-month-old at home and I’m looking at him and thinking, ‘well what’s this country that we’re now living in.'”
Or take the federal staff in this video. They’re a little less melodramatic, and they may actually have a point that they were working on projects that the government needs, and really earning their paychecks. Many of them surely were; mass firings are a blunt instrument and mistaken or ill-advised firings will surely happen. But when did it become normal to act as though you are legally or morally entitled to your job, and to complain on social media as if the loss of your government job was somehow worse or more distressing than any private sector downturn in labor?
Leftist politicians, of course, are giving bullhorns and platforms to aggrieved federal employees to screech at everyone about how indispensable they are.
One thing is obvious-the public isn’t sympathetic. Here are some of the online reactions.
Collin Rugg himself, who posted the original tweet, noticed the entitlement of government workers:
