A Word to Older Generations

This angry insomniac rant won't be very polite. You have been warned.

To all the "Greatest Generation" and Baby Boomers who want to blame younger folks for apathy and laziness: Shut the fuck up. Yeah, I'm going there. Depending on how you want to calculate dates, I might be catalogued as an exceptionally young member of Gen X, but more likely I'm an old Millennial, so I'm gonna go ahead and throw Gen X under the bus, too.

You ran up impossible debt and left us holding the bag. Your social experiments have gone down in flames every damn time. Your Ponzi schemes make us foot the bill for your medical care and retirement. Your jingoistic warmongering gave us the Cold War, chaos in the Middle East, and various smaller interventions across the globe, saddling us with massive expenses as you borrowed on our earnings as your collateral. You tell us to agitate for raising the minimum wage instead of asking why you devalued the dollar and crippled economic progress. Your policies keep housing prices high because you think it makes you wealthy even though that means we struggle to even pay rent, and then you say we're lazy for having so many of our generation moving back home. Every grand scheme from the Great Society to Obamacare has failed, but you spin them as successes anyway. Now you offer to benevolently assume even more power even though those policies retarded (or even reversed) all the real progress that had been made before then. Do you really expect us to believe a "Green New Deal" will fix any root problems? What does "Make America Great Again" actually mean? You taught us to argue over these partisan false choices as if they really matter.

You have the audacity to claim we're lazy and ungrateful. Damn right we're ungrateful. You've done everything you could to kill the legacy economy, and then tried to bulldoze any progress outside of that with taxation, regulation, and prohibition. Anything new must be bad, so government needs control. Bitcoin? Uber? Gotta get in the way! Hell, you've even overseen new restrictions on travel and punishing kids who run lemonade stands. You're the ones who pushed college debt as a path to prosperity, and now people with useless college degrees are competing for entry-level jobs because you sold them a bill of goods. Unfortunately, most of my generation are also seeing the endless insanity of politics as both an empty answer and the only option. We don't want incalculable debt, senseless wars, economic collapse, crumbling infrastructure, or control freaks running our lives. That's some pretty goddamned bleak shit. What the fuck do you expect besides apathy in response?

We need a glimmer of hope, not your petty demands and condescending criticism as you pile more burdens on our backs and offer us the poison pill of politics as if it were a cure for the ills you inflicted on us. Youwere the ones with power. You abused it. Maybe you should pay the price? Swallow your pride, apologize, and admit your own responsibility for the mess we're in. Don't sell us more of the same mistakes with a fresh coat of paint. If you old fuckers participated in the system, you have no claim to authority or legitimacy. You built this monument to failure, and no, the fix isn't more damned legislation and bureaucracy. We tried it your way, and it doesn't work. Your social models are as relevant as flat earth theory.

Thanks to you, Gen Z has only known perpetual "war on terror," propaganda masquerading as news, economic turmoil, and the all-pervading surveillance state. You old fuckers built that while promising peace, freedom and prosperity. Shut up, get out of the way, and let us experiment with real liberty. We can't possibly fuck up as badly as you did after you expressed the same sentiments.