#TheFinal14 | The Greatest Generation

This is a post that I have toyed with writing for some time. It’s gone through many iterations. It's been written from places of anger, pride, and empathy. But today, as we hit the final stretch of this blog, I’ve decided to write about our Generation with all three of them.

I’ve decided to write about us, the young, because I believe in my heart that we’re gonna be the best of them.

I already know some are going to dismiss this. They’ll call me a narcissist, a self centered Millennial who never looks up from his computer to realize the world around him (which is funny coming from the generations that let racism, sexism, homophobia, etc fester for years due to their blind eyes, but I digress). But it doesn’t really matter what they think. We’ve never been concerned about it before, and we’re not going to start now.

Above all, we’re dreamers.

When we were kids, our parents taught us lessons. They taught us to treat people with respect. They taught us to reach for the stars. They taught us to believe in fairytales. When we were older, our parents, for some reasons unknown, taught us something different. Many taught us to look out for ours. They taught us that the world was a messy place. They told us that fairytales weren’t real. But we didn’t listen.

You see, we still believe in those fairytales that you read to us so intently as children. We still believe that empathy is above all, and that even if you reach for the moon and fail, you’ll land among those twinkle twinkle little stars. We still believe in our power to change the world.

I know for some of you, some of you not keen to our way of thinking, are confused by us.

You confuse our hope for being naive. You confuse our passion with a phase. You confuse our anger with a stale country, with stale policies, and stale policy makers with unfounded whining. You confuse our constant use of technology to change the world as a waste of time. You confuse our love for each other for hippie nonsense. And you stupidly confuse our masses and our movements as insignificant.

I’ve watched the news just like you over the last couple of weeks. I’ve watched the processions of children, their lives ripped from them because our politicians value money over us. They value votes over us. And I’ve watched as students, just like me, have turned their pain, their tragedy, and their trauma into a movement. They turned the notion that it’s always too god damn early to talk about change on its head. They have those said politicians shifting in their seats, and they’ve got an entire generation behind them. Because we have all had enough. For years, we’ve been told to wait our turn. We’ve been told that our turn to run the world was coming. But over the last 18 months it’s become clear that we simply can’t wait. We won't wait.

We say enough to long standing traditions rooted in ill intentions. We say enough to practices that hold certain people down and prop certain people up. We say enough to the disbandment of civic virtue and the misunderstanding of civic duty. We call BS to impossible, to too hard, to the way it's always been, and to the way it has to be. We say enough.

Enough.

And that is why we’re going to be the best of them. And our kids, the best of us. Because it’s not about money, it's not about getting ours. It's about helping nudge the hand of time, moving the slide of equality, and creating a better world for the next Generation so they can be even better than us.

So they can make our impossible, their reality. Just like we did. Just like we’re going to do.

Cheers,

EICHEL | @EichelGDavis