Dear baby boomers and gen-x: You’ve taken our creativity and told us that it matters not because it fulfills us, but because we can sell it to a college and reap the returns on our “investment” decades from now. Every little thing we do must be harnessed for profit. And you wonder why we seem to have no spontaneity left. You have done our work for us, then called us lazy. You have threatened our teachers, then told us “just an A” isn’t good enough.You have gotten our jobs for us, and called us underachievers.You have recorded everything we do, like researchers breeding a better mouse. You have made us trophy-seekers, then mocked us for our walls of worthless awards.You have pitted us against each other in a fight for success, which has become survival.You have given us a world in which even our college degrees are meaningless because there are just too many of us. You have made us depend on you. When we followed your instructions – went to the best schools, got the best grades, took the most internships and did the most independent study projects, met the right people and got into the right grad schools and chosen the right majors – we’ve ended up stuck in your basement because nobody in your generation is willing to pay us a living wage. Then you called us the “boomerang” generation that refuses to grow up. When did we have the chance? We don’t think we’re special. We know that being “special” and a dollar won’t even buy us a cup of coffee anymore. We learned something else along the way to becoming “special.” We learned that you depended on us. For validation. For certainty that you did everything right. If we did not succeed, it reflected badly on you. When you told us that you loved us and that we were smart, beautiful, creative, independent, and destined for greatness, what you implied was that we must be all of those things or that you would cease to love us. That our lives would cease to be worth anything. That we might as well die if we’re not the best.We are drowsy with medications that we take to calm the fear that if we are anything less than the best, we will fall through the cracks. We spend our days fighting each other, always fearing our invisible duplicate who has everything we have on her resume, plus one. We don’t even know what’s down there in the zone of failure – we just know that our failure scares you so much, we’d better never dare to fall. So we work twice as many hours as you did for half the pay and come home to your taunts about how we’re twenty-six and still can’t afford an apartment. We’re told that if we’ve ever been on welfare we come from inferior stock: lazy parents who breed entitled children. We try to go to school and pull ourselves up, somewhere nearer to equal footing with the children of the elite, and find that we’re up against insurmountable odds. We do our own homework, and we find ourselves at the bottom of the pile because other people’s parents have already helped them blow away the playing field. We struggle to earn our own money so we won’t be accused of expecting handouts, then watch our grades drop. If we pull our grades back up, we find that we’re up against the spotless records of other kids who were racking up sports trophies while we packed grocery bags and mowed lawns. Do we think we’re special just because we might get into college? A place where we’ll spend four years racking up debt in numbers that we’ve never seen? The truth is, we never thought we were special. You did. You thought we were special because we were extensions of you You trained us to be the children you could brag about. Then, all of a sudden, everybody had one and we were no longer good enough, like outdated toys.We were supposed to fulfill all your unrealized potential.We were supposed to live your dreams. We were supposed to have what you never had, do what you never did and be who you never were. We can’t. We know the congratulations are hollow, the awards meaningless, the degrees redundant, the ceremonies overwrought. We aren’t surprised; you are.If there is anything that defines our generation, it’s knowing exactly how miserably our lives have failed to satisfy you. We grew up imagining that we could be like you, but we’re not. You have prevented us from being like you. There is a generation in America that believes in its own specialness. I will agree with that. But you’ve got its identity wrong. It’s not us, it’s you.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:52:44 +0000
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