open letter to gen z from a jaded millenial
like a lot of people my age, i’m a huge gen z fan. i’ve worked in high schools for ten years, so i’ve seen y’all up close. you have always impressed and amazed me.
i’m a millennial, but that word has been used to mean so many things that it means nothing now. what i mean is this:
i was born the year the reagan presidency ended. i remember the y2k panic from the perspective of an aware but confused ten-year-old. i watched thousands of people die in a sixth grade classroom and panicked about my uncle who worked in manhattan at the time. i began checking the news every day. i watched american flags pop up everywhere and first saw xenophobia get wielded at people who were clearly scapegoats. in eighth grade, i got a computer in my bedroom and a war started between my mother and i over tying up the phone line (some of you may need to look up “the sound of dial up”). before twitter and instagram, we had chat rooms, aol profiles, and myspace. we taught ourselves coding and photoshop to make the c00lest backgrounds and *~*~layouts~*~*. we were cringe before there was cringe. we went from calling the house phone to make plans to texting when we got to the mall. we went from wandering through F.Y.E. with our crushes to stealing so much music that the industry gave up trying to sell it to us.
what i’m saying is we grew up during some wild shit too. i know what it’s like for everything to change every six months and to be always ahead of the adults around you. people stayed lying to us too and we also created our own weird little bubbles on the internet. thinking back on it, it all feels like some sort of anxious rainbow road + sims fever dream.
i’ve been angry, opinionated, and disgusted by the opinions of adults around me since the 20th century, but the 2004 election politicized me. there was a video game called “the bush game” that i played for hours (i have scoured the internet for evidence — if you have proof that i have not been mandela effected, please contact me). so, when the ’04 election came around (it wasn’t that long ago, cut the “okay boomer” jokes, goddamnit), i was IN IT. i skipped confirmation class to go to my first political rally. i wrote angry live journal posts. i was SURE that this sleazy, lying, moron who we “misunderestimated” would lose and that the worst presidency i would ever live through would end. despite the overwhelming “i’d have a beer with that guy” sentiment in central pennsylvania where i lived, i was positive the average american could see how evil this administration was. see, before george w. bush was a painter and friend of ellen degeneres or was in “cute” pictures sharing candy with michelle obama, he was a war criminal who lied and capitalized on islamophobia to bomb innocent brown people, bloat military and military contractor budgets, and strip americans of privacy. he was running against a man who was a vietnam war vet who testified in the fulbright hearings and would later go on to be secretary of state and sign the paris accords.
bush won by 3,012,166 popular votes and 35 electoral votes.
i sat on the carpet in the living room sputtering in disbelief and crying. i could not believe that people who had lived in america during the same four years i did would vote for this fucking clown. i couldn’t imagine going to school the next day.
3 years later, i left pennsyltucky to head to DC to study political science. i showed up full of hope the year before obama was elected but found myself at an expensive school where kids with connections got red-badged, capitol hill internships and i served them ½ price pitchers and pizzas at a pub on campus a couple nights a week to survive and help my family out. i changed majors after seeing politics from a closer distance, but still canvased for obama in ’08. we ran to the white house on election day crying and singing. my mom drove my prom dress down from home so i would have something to wear to my school’s inaugural ball. things seemed to be starting to make sense again.
another presidency later in 2016, i was a civics teacher at a high school in the ninth ward of new orleans, louisiana. i made sure my kids knew who their district and at-large city council members were and taught community organizing principals. i convinced our principal to pay for a bus to take my 18-year-old seniors to vote early. on election day the other civics teacher and i volunteered to drive people without cars to the polls. i hadn’t voted for secretary clinton in the primary but i decided to just be happy about a woman being president for the first time in american history.
when i laid in bed awake all night after the election results, i wasn’t sad or shocked. i was ashamed, afraid, and angry — ashamed that i hadn’t seen this coming despite everything i knew about american history and culture — afraid for my loved ones and students who were black, brown, queer, undocumented, poor, disabled, trans, and/or owners of uteruses — angry that this is who almost half of our country, more than half of white women like myself, wanted to be president. the ’04 election politicized me, but the the 2016 election radicalized me.
younger siblings, here’s what i want to say: i don’t have a desire to shape your specific positions or get myself on a government watch list any sooner than is inevitable, but i do want to tell you that this system is never going to give you the change you want and deserve. everything about american politics, the criminal punishment system, and the school system is built to preserve the ever more harmful status quo. psychologically people are victims of normalcy and confirmation bias. we look away from trauma even when it’s in our own houses, so why would we fight it publicly? theorists have been saying we were in late stage capitalism since the turn of the 21st century, but the revolution hasn’t come. our president is one of only two viable candidates in a horrifically outdated, two-party system whose elections depend on the absurd electoral college system adopted in 1788. he told us that not paying taxes was smart, cruelly and childishly mocked a disabled reporter, and was revealed to have described grabbing women “by the pussy” BEFORE he was elected the first time. he tried to black mail the leader of a whole other country in order to make his opponent look bad. he admitting to knowing how dangerous the coronavirus was and still downplayed it and as of today over 216,000 of us have died. we watch (cw: black death) a black woman or man be murdered by armed officers of our cities and states consistently and are fighting just to prove they matter. no election can undo any of this.
i don’t know that there will ever be a moment big enough to change everything. i don’t know what it would take for america to reach our “let them eat cake” boiling point for our 630 billionaires. what i know is, we’re already too many centuries and too many genocides past where we should have drawn the line.
i don’t know the solution. i don’t believe that anyone from my generation does and i sure as shit know the folks in charge don’t. i’m also not about to put the burden of “saving us all” on your generation either.
i just want to give you what i wish someone had given me. the truth.
this moment is not unprecedented, new, or unique. pandemics, racists, and capitalism have been around for a long time and the system that got us here, won’t rescue us.
i wish this election could fix things or that a hero was coming, but it won’t and they aren’t.
the good news is, a lot of y’all are already light years ahead of where we were. keep telling the truth. keep looking out for each other. keep building community and calling out bullshit where you see it. keep creating and dreaming and refusing and fucking it up.
i’ll keep working towards a better world for all of us since that’s all any of us can really do.
