Dear Baby Boomers,
I’d love to tell you I’m writing this in a storm of angry passion, hellbent on changing the world. But the truth is, I’m 27 years old. I’m a Millennial, one of those folks your media loves to hate so much, and I am tired. I’m less than 30 years old and the thought of another 50 years living the way I live is enough to make me hope I die young. And so very often, I hear “Not all Baby Boomers!” And here’s the harsh truth: we don’t care. We don’t care about “not all Baby Boomers” in the same way we don’t care about “not all cops” or “not all men.” I am writing this in a moment of “not that anybody will listen.” In a moment of “maybe, if I write it out, I’ll stop suffocating.” There’s no passion here. After less than three decades, there is only defeat.
So let me explain why, yes, it is all Baby Boomers, and why Millennials hate you.
We hate you because of our wages. I’m in a training-management position, in management, and making $8.20 an hour. When I get my fancy new shirt, it’ll go up to $8.70. That’s $18,096 a year. Except that’s not really what I make, because I work up to 50 hours a week, so it’s more like $19000 when all is said and done—if I get paid. My employer is a fast food chain that routinely engages in wage theft and requires a forced-arbitration agreement, something your generation came up with.
Your generation tells me to “get a better job,” when there are no “better jobs” hiring within walking distance and I can’t afford a car. Your generation tells me to “get a second job,” when I am exhausted working six days a week, while walking to work in 110-degree weather, ten to twelve hours every day. And while I’m there, it’s predominantly your generation that gets rude and entitled and up in my face and calls me names and tells me my generation has no manners and tries to flirt with my 16-year-old trainee. It’s mostly your generation that demands a manager when I say I can’t take a coupon that expired six months ago and drives my teenage coworkers to tears, because bullying a powerless child is fun or something.
We hate you because of our college debt. Every single person in my family over the age of 45 who’s gone to college (except my mom, who went in the 1990s and feels my same pain) has told me if I wasn’t so lazy in college I could have paid off my education with a summer job. Well gosh golly gee, I’m earning a buck more now per hour than I did at my college summer job, and still only making $19k per year, so yeah, explain how three months in the summer would pay off my $30k in debt! And Baby Boomers who claim they hate the debt inequality of colleges very often conveniently ignore that they prop it up themselves—by running free “internships” and supporting college sports. Many college football coaches make upward of 16x the money earned by the college president. Know where that money comes from? Yeah, it’s not from rich alumni.
Your generation tells us “gosh, we’re sorry” and does nothing. Your generation, in fact, remains complicit.
We hate you because we can’t afford kids, and you berate us for it.
We hate you because you say we are destroying the economy with our refusal to buy cars and houses, when if you talk to any one of us we’ll say “god, a car and an apartment . . . that’s the dream. If only. If only.” It’s not refusal, it’s inability.
We hate you because you yell at us to get better jobs, but won’t fucking retire so we can have better jobs . . . assuming we can get them without a college degree, internship, and forty years’ experience.
We hate you because when we say we have no money, you tell us to stop drinking and doing drugs. We look at you with your “wine moms” and your cigarette habits, and we think about all the nights we’ve sat and watched Netflix because it was the only thing we could afford to do, and we hate you a little more for your hypocrisy and your assumption that “no money” = “blowing everything on poor life decisions.” Choosing to eat real food twice a week instead of ramen is not a poor life decision.
We hate you because far too many of us know how to stitch our own wounds, splint our own broken fingers, and treat our own yeast infections, because insurance doesn’t equal affordable and in spite of Obamacare doctors and medical treatment are still primarily for rich people. Meanwhile, you trumpet about what awesome progress has been made.
We hate you because you invented the anti-vax movement, and really? What the fuck? Do I even have to explain how I don’t want my nieces to die of measles because of you assholes?
We hate you because we are tired. We commit suicide in record numbers and the Boomers go “golly, why?” Nobody asks about the trauma impact of the 24-hour news cycle or the devastating after-effects of being the participation-medal generation. It’s easier to blame video games and cell phones than stagnant wages and abusive parents. Nobody asks what it’s like to be part of a generation that went to school taking it for granted every single day that we might come home in a pine box, riddled with bullet holes. Boomers are all too eager to talk patriotism and tragedy over 9/11, but they’re all mysteriously silent about the impact of being twelve years old and watching the world you knew end on network TV; of hearing your DC-dwelling sister screaming into the phone that she’d just witnessed a terrorist attack.
We hate you because you treat us as though we’re somehow reprehensible because most of us suffer low-grade PTSD after decades of school shootings (and Boomer inaction) and fiscal depression (and Boomer inaction) and police brutality (and Boomer inaction) and war (and Boomer escalation). Gen Z has it even worse, having grown up never knowing a world even remotely at peace, and yet thousands of suicides per year are treated as a “mysterious epidemic” instead of “maybe we should stop treating our children like shit.”
We hate you because you call us lazy, entitled, spoiled, childish, and never realize you’re looking in a mirror.
We hate you because you offer no solutions, only pity, and when we bring our solutions to the table you shoot them down faster than a cop chasing an innocent black kid.
We hate you because you were the “me” generation, and you still are the “me” generation, and you’ll probably die being the “me” generation. But the truth is, it’s no longer about you. It’s about us, and the world we live in, and the wasteland you want us to bring children into. We hate you because we are terrified, and because you have left us no choice.
So save your cries of “not all Baby Boomers!” because yes . . . yes, it is.
