Reply #167: Yeah, that's all of us. [View All]

[antigone382]

You figured the next generation out. I wish I could show you all the kids I know who have been abandoned by one or both of their parents and struggled through a level of poverty that few of the baby boomers had to deal with or can understand. I know what it means to take a bucket bath. I know what it means to ration the rice so the dogs can eat too. I know what it means to work my ass off supporting myself and my family while going to school with no federal funding.

And for what? Even my professors are telling me that the system we've had for the last fifty years is coming to an end, that making a living resembling anything like what we've had in the past is going to be next to impossible with peak oil and all the other crises around the bend. One even subtly hinted that we may as well all drop out and learn how to feed ourselves off the little decent farmland that hasn't been clogged with subdivisions or drained of all fertility.

Do you not read the reports of increasing worker productivity in the face of decreasing wages? Do you think the younger generation is somehow exempt from the expectation to do more and more, for less and less, under increasingly hostile conditions? Whatever reports someone has read about empathy somewhere, it isn't what I've seen in my daily life with my friends. At least within my own group, we work hard. We support each other. We have a sense of responsibility towards each other and our world. We do the best we can in a world that makes less and less sense. I would never refer to another age group, older or younger, by such a blanket accusation as "unempathetic, unbearable whiners." It is insulting, ignorant, and childish.

Edit: to give you a sense of this generation: My campus has a monthly lunchtime session called Peanut Butter & Gender. Yesterday, an Afro-Columbian woman came to our campus to tell us of the displacement of her people due to the drug war, both singing and speaking through an interpreter (though I understood about half of what she said). The room was packed to the gills (and about half the students were wearing purple in solidarity with the GLBT movement). Two weeks ago, I went with some other students to tour a fair trade coffee facility. A month ago, a large group of students on our campus went to Washington D.C. to protest mountaintop removal. We have an entire building dedicated to student-initiated service projects, staffed and run entirely by college students--I tutor ESL once a week there. We are actively involved in trying to recreate a better world, and I am absolutely confident that we will have as much (or more) success, as any generation preceding us.