Healing the Divide: Transforming Generational Resentment into Em

It has been our elders who have created cynics and nihilist, only to turn around and tell us to pull ourselves up.

Being 28, I don’t feel like a millenial, and I don’t feel like apart of Gen X. I’ve had one foot in the world of outside play; of getting down and dirty. I got hurt and got in trouble. I’ve also had my foot in the internet age. It came around at the right time to swoop me up and swallow me whole. However, staring down the finish line of my twenties; no plan for retirement, no access to housing. Education that no longer leads to the middle class. I start to resent those that came before me.

I’ve been around through war, and recession, disease and social unrest, and all I can think is; what else will come our way? I know what will come our way. It has been beaten into our minds: catastrophe, extinction, peril, calamity.

I grew up with the idea that parents, coaches, leaders; were all giving us the best advice they had, so that we could fulfill a fundamental promise of this country: That the next generation will be better off than the last, and so on, and so on; but folks in my generation have stopped believing in that.

Retirement is a joke my generation uses as a punch line.

I don’t think you can blame us because it feels like everyone these days uses it as a joke. I see it too often that well off folks say there won’t be any money left for us kids — But what have they done about it? The older folks moan about it so often, you would think it was a major concern and yet that joke continues to be used year after year.

It erodes a person when they learn that their generation is the useless one.

I’m sorry we could not be the ones who stormed Normandy, or persisted in Vietnam; or even watched as Europe was again united. We were born when, unlucky as it seems, the previous generations succumbed to the decadence that their age bred and they turned self righteous as if they were actually saving us from the progress that was steadily accelerating. They feared the future as we do, so they either sheltered us to become useless or sociopathic; with the latter looking to be all too common. So, the world transitioned and started to become hollow because all the wealth was being engineered to flow upwards, while pho gadgets that mimicked affluence trickled down to wreak havoc on us below.

When I brought this up to my boomer parents, they scoffed at the romanticism I painted for them. They then described a world that was mired in revolution and terror. Bombings were daily occurrences, as mobs battled in the streets. Society looked to be on the brink as human rights fought for dominance. All of this with the backdrop of nuclear annihilation.

My feelings can still be valid, while having more empathy for those that raised us.

They did what they could, with the information they had. Good men and women have emerged and hopefully will lead a lost generation to new lands.

I have gratitude for my generation’s parents. Their judgements were the best they had. Yes, there was death and suicide; loss of will and hope, and rebellion towards what the past had given us, but there is still no excuse for the cynicism as a reaction towards it all. Instead, we could stop our cynicism and prepare our sons and daughters for the world. We could take our mistakes, our wisdom; the lessons we learned from years of experiments and tell those that will inherit the future, things will be alright.

I know there will be tough times ahead, but there are always tough times. Cynics aren’t wise, just cowards, and pessimist are failures. I’m happy to say I am no longer either.