Here’s the thing, guys, there’s the damn thing. I’m seeing a lot of comments like “sorry we failed you” and “go do what we could not” and so on and so forth. It’s really disheartening talk, and I get it, beLIEVE me, I get it. But I want y’all to think for just a second about how much the beating we’ve taken as a generation is playing right into the hands of the assholes who want to silence the Z kids.
We grew up on the same stories Z’ers did. HP, Hunger Games, all that. We read the same stuff. We jumped out into the world ready to do anything. And the Boomers in charge immediately blind sided us. We knew the recession/depression we’d grown up in was bad—now that we were adults, they shoved the burden of it off on us, they blamed it on us, and had the audacity to demand that WE fix it. The economy and world we were promised by our parents growing up wasn’t there anymore. Daring to have dreams if you weren’t from an already supremely privileged background was suddenly tantamount to signing your own death warrant. Now, we all just struggle to survive, burdened by lifetime debts, mental and physical illnesses we can’t often afford to treat, and a crushing sense of defeat.
Not to sound like a total conspiracy nut, but that is exactly what they want.
To the Boomers in charge, we are supposed to be a lesson to all future generations of what happens when you challenge the system in anyway. We started claiming our differences (to mixed success), and they punished us for trying to openly live and love our truths. We tried to make our dreams and life goals happen, and they punished us with crippling debt for an education they no longer value. We asked for help with out struggles, and they punished us for having neurochemical imbalances, physical disabilities, for being abused and neglected and not just sucking it up but daring to want things to be different, to change for the better.
Our current state of downtrodden obeisance is what they want, and what they expected the Z’ers to follow. Look at the Millennials, we have ground them down to barely scraping by, and if you don’t toe the line, you will join them.
And rather than accept that, these kids are screaming up a storm and throwing down a challenge that the Boomers are scrambling to react to.
They didn’t expect these kids to look at what happened to us and say “FUCK NO. You may have killed their spirit but you haven’t killed ours!” And they clearly do not know what to do about it.
So where does that leave us? Well, clearly we’re all in support of these kids. But all those comments of “we’re too tired and depressed to help but goodonya”? If that’s all you can muster because of your life circumstances, that is awesome and fine, but for the rest of us who are able to do a little more, we need to do more. After all, these kids are also all dealing with many of the same things we’re dealing with, like depression and anxiety and discrimination. Where do you think they started learning about that stuff from? Where do you think they got the example that they deserve better in spite of all that?
Millennials, we’re now all generally in our early/mid-20s up into 30s. That doesn’t mean our protest days are over! What in the world would make you think that? Do we have the same amount of comparative free time that these Gen Z kids have? No, generally not. But they are also risking a lot here in order to have their voices heard. It’s wrong to ask them to risk so much when we ourselves won’t risk as much. But also, how boss would it be if Millennials suddenly rose up alongside them and helped to make the changes we want to see?
Years after they think they’ve beaten us into submission, we take a solid, tangible stand alongside the Gen Z kids. We multiply the number of people speaking out and exercising our right to be heard and enact change when they think they’ve beaten the fight out of us. We do more than offer our best wishes, we offer our time and our sweat and our tears to help the Z’ers accomplish these goals. Our youths are not necessarily behind us, and just because we’re adults now does not mean we have to stop fighting.
We can push back alongside them and make it clear that they didn’t break us, they just made us stronger and angrier. The only lesson they taught the world by crushing us down was that the way we’ve been treated is wrong, and that everyone deserves better.
What I’m saying is, please don’t buy into the idea that we Millennials are, as a generation, defeated. We are far from it. The way some of you are talking, it sounds like you’re all 80+ year old soldiers who have already fought this war. And while maybe life has smacked you around enough that it feels that way, the truth is we were benched from the war before we even had a chance to fight more than a few battles. They’ve been keeping us so locked down in the trenches of despair that we don’t even remember what the battle field looks like.
These Gen Z kids are Wonder Woman charging out of the trench and barreling across No Man’s Land when no one thought it was possible. We need to be Steve Trevor and every man in those trenches who charges out behind her to back her up. She can take care of herself, but she can always use some help. We need to be that help
Don’t give in to the despair, don’t give in to the Boomers’ hopes that we’re too downtrodden to help. Gen Z is paving the way. We can still stand right next to them and change the course of history.
