Hello.
First, let me just say that many of the millennials I've had the
privilege to know and live with and/or work besides are, in my
opinion, pretty amazing people. They're thoughtful, conscientious,
hard-working, considerate, compassionate, smart, funny, brave, and
capable of caring about people other than themselves to a remarkable
degree. They are our hope for the future. Mad props and respect to
all of you.
This screed is not directed at you.
It's directed at your friends,
colleagues, comrades, enemies, and the other so-called adults who are
going to populate the landscape of your life for the rest of your
life, and to that end I say, good luck. You're going to need
it.
Many of your generation apparently grew
up being fed a smorgasbord of huge, criminally appalling lies. Those who fed them
to you should taken out back and shot, stat. Since I keep having to
reap the benefits of this shitty child-rearing, education, and
corporate “cultural” immersion, as a favor to you and the rest of
humanity, I'm taking this opportunity to disabuse you of a few of the
most egregious lies from which you have built your toxic worldviews.
1. First off, just to be clear, you
are entitled to jack shit. Let me rephrase that. You are entitled
to fuck all. You are not entitled to anything,
period. You're not entitled to love, or kindness, or sunshine
and rainbows, or fun, or a job, or health care, or a nice, clean
planet, or happiness.
You don't get what you want because
you're entitled to it, you get it—if you get it—because you work
really fucking hard for it. Or because someone in your family is
rich and willing to share. You don't want to work hard? Marry
someone rich or get comfortable with homelessness.
But, but, you say, life's not fair.
White men with American passports, fully able-bodied,
hetero-preferences, and no debt have it WAAAAAAAAY easier than the
rest of us. Yep, you're right. Because life's not fair. So get off
your ass and change it, like women, people of color, queer, disabled
folks and immigrants have been doing for-fucking-ever.
In the real world, people struggle for
what they want and need. The forty-hour work week? No one gave us
that—our elders fought, were beaten, jailed and in some cases,
died—for that. The right to vote? Same. The right to free speech,
such as it still exists? You betcha.
You're not entitled to all the
electronic bullshit you carry around with you. You get it because you
live in the fucked up heart of an empire that exploits workers and
the planet to give you expensive toys you don't fucking need, so the
corporate moguls who thought up this scheme could buy a bunch of
expensive toys they don't fucking need.
You're not entitled to electricity,
particularly when it's brought to you on the back of a drowned Syrian
child refugee or a beaten and jailed Lakota mother. You're not
entitled to clean water, or cheap organic food, or South American
coffee. All those things have a huge fucking price tag, and you're
not the one paying it.
You're not entitled to be debt-free
when you get out of college, or ever, unless you do a much better job
destroying neo-liberal capitalism than it's currently doing.
You are not entitled to a new car or
any car, a cell phone, a computer, a house, or even a safe place to
live.
But, you say, some of these are basic
human rights. A) Props to you for knowing that and B) a right is not
an entitlement. It's a thing that a fuck-ton of people fought and
died for, against oppressive bastards determined to keep them down,
since long before you were fucking even born. Don't take it for
fucking granted. Say “thank you,” every hour of every day for
what they suffered for you, and keep fighting, goddamnit.
2. In the real world, you don't get
praised and rewarded for showing up. You do not get praised and
rewarded for doing what you are contractually obligated to do. You
don't get praised or rewarded for doing what you said you would do.
In fact, you're damned lucky if that's ever even acknowledged.
You do get criticized,
corrected, yelled-at, fired, or left for failing to do what
you are obligated to do. This is called reality. It's also called
adulthood. Yeah, I know it fucking sucks. They lied to you about that
part too.
Doing what is expected of you, because
it's expected, and sometimes even doing a little bit more, is called
being a responsible and decent human being, not a fucking hero. You
don't get a lollipop, or a trophy, or a 3-day break for it. You get
to keep your job, or your marriage, or your kid, or your
relationship, or your self-respect, if you're lucky, and that's your
fucking reward.
Your boss is going to get pissed off at
you sometimes. Sometimes it's going to be because she has a
headache, or his husband left him, or she drank too much the night
before. But sometimes it's going to be because you really fucking
deserve it. And how do you respond?
First let's talk about what you don't
do. You don't blame your boss for your fuck-up. You don't throw your
colleague under the bus and say it was her fault. You do not quit,
you do not sulk, you do not stalk off in a huff, you do not take all
your toys and leave the playground. Maybe you take a walk, or smoke a
cigarette, or draw a picture of said boss being brutally murdered, or
go to the bathroom and cry. Then, you woman-up, recognize you fucked
up, own it, apologize for it, and seek to make reparation.
This is so basic and necessary to being
human it blows my wee little mind that people have to be taught this.
But of course you do. Because this little matter of taking
responsibility for one's actions and being willing and able to be
held accountable for same is rapidly dissolving into mythology in
this country, especially if one looks at contemporary political and
corporate discourse and behavior. Sure, black welfare moms will be
held accountable if they lie, but our next potential President,
Hillary Rodham Clinton? Donald Trump? Please.
You've been subjected to cognitive
dissonance your entire lives, so, I get it. That's why I'm laying it
down for you. When they told you life's a rose garden and the sun
shines out of your ass and a college degree will get you anything but
debt and work should be fun, they lied. Hear it, accept it, grieve
over it, integrate into your consciousness, move the fuck on.
3. To that end, show some fucking
respect to your elders, even if we are a bunch of assholes leaving
you a world more fucked up than we found it. Guess what? Maybe
we're not. Maybe it was even more fucked up when it was handed to us.
You don't know. And you wanna know why you don't know? Because you
never ask. You have your eyes buried in a screen, your ears shut off
from the world by head-phones, your brain God-knows-where. You don't
ask us about our life experience, or thoughts, or visions, or hopes,
or ideas. You won't even ask us for a pancake recipe or directions
for a place we've been to a hundred times because that's what you
have Lord Google-the-Fucking-All-Knowing for.
It's possible, however, unlikely, that
those of us 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years older than you might actually
know things you don't, might actually have something to say worth
listening to. It's even possible we might know things
The-Great-and-Powerful-Google doesn't, and we don't come with ads or
pop-ups.
Oh, and all those things you dream of
doing we've done, so please don't teach us about them. It's fucking
insulting.
4. A lot of seeming archaic skills
and bits of knowledge are things you might want to actually learn at
some point. All of the following are things I've actually had to
teach people in their 20s, most of them white, middle-class, college
graduates:
- Basic addition. You should be able to add five single-digit numbers in your head by the time you're ten years old in this country without having an aneurysm, all the more so if you've actually graduated high school.
- How to make change and properly count it back to a person.
- How to wash dishes by hand.
- How to make a bed.
- How to cook yourself a healthy breakfast.
- How to heat up leftovers without a microwave.
- How to read a map. How to ask for directions from a human
- What a tea kettle is, and how to use it to heat water.
- How to connect a hose.
- How to read handwriting.
- The fact that pie pans are round, like pies.
- The fact that the yolk of an egg can be runny but the egg is still cooked and safe to eat.
- Who David Bowie was, who Che Guevara was, who Mao Tse-Tung was, who Ralph Nader is, and the fact that Margaret Thatcher was not an actress.
5. Finally, but perhaps most
importantly, your word is your fucking bond. It means something,
or nothing about you means anything. If you make a commitment
a. you fucking keep it;
b. you have an incredibly valid
reason for not doing so (“I have testicular cancer” works; “I
want to go hiking” does not); or
c. you negotiate equally, with the
person/people to whom you are committed, a termination to the
commitment. And no, this does not absolve you of responsibility for
the damage done by your breaking your commitment.
Once you say you're going to do
something, people count on you. Companies count on you. Governments
may count on you. Animals, plants and children count on you. They
need you. You fucking matter.
Maybe nobody ever told you that before,
so let me say it again, a little louder.
YOU
FUCKING MATTER!!!!!!!
You have to fucking show up and do what
you said you would. If you don't, bad things happen, to other people
and possibly also to you. If “bad things happening to other people
as a result of you not keeping your word” doesn't bother you, you
suffer from a psychological disorder known as narcissism. You should
start therapy immediately. Or run for President. One of the two.
Keeping your word is the bedrock of
integrity. Without it, no one ever can or will trust you with
anything. You're not entitled to trust, or to be entrusted with
anything, from a goat's well-being to a person's heart. You fucking
earn that. And then you keep earning it every single day, or you
lose it.
Sometimes in this life you actually
have to do things you don't fucking want to do. Get over it, and
welcome to Planet Earth.
