kkelenca:

usbdongle:

millenial generation got a little too beaten down and miserable but im delighted to see that gen z seems to be frothing at the mouth and out for blood

There’s two big facets to this that occurred to me while I was brushing my teeth for bed and thinking about this post.

The dystopian shit ambushed our (millennial) generation. We had very peaceful childhoods for the most part: parents having unrivaled job stability following the 80s recession recovery and no major war upheavals that hit home at us quite the same way previous generations or Z had with Vietnam/Bosnia and later “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Suddenly, 9/11 happened and our world changed overnight: thanks to the PATRIOT Act, civil liberties began to crumble, steadily losing all the ground that (largely black, women) activists had pushed for and gained during the past decades. Columbine was only two years past when it all started slipping further and further away, but we weren’t even out of school yet to be able to vote—which most of us believed still was the way to control politics, back then. We were raised on a steady message of college as the way to go and fairness and American dreams, only to graduate into the worst recession this country has seen since the Great Depression in the 30s, saddled with outrageous levels of student loan debt thanks to uncontrollable ballooning inflation in academia. Too tired and too poor to organize, most ended up just fighting to survive for a long time.

It’s hard for us to imagine, but we didn’t really have this sort of unbridled internet access (for now, thanks for nothing, FCC) that we take for granted. It was still in its infancy for the most part when the era of School shootings began, so we didn’t have the tools that exist now to really band together on a national scale to stand up for ourselves. We didn’t have access to the same level of real-time global news, or un-whitewashed history that gave a better understanding of how the civil rights era really managed to get things done. We had geocities and Napster, not discord servers and real-time social media for reporting, planning, and connecting.

Thankfully these Gen Z kids have seen the ugly truths of our country for what they are since day one, and have had the good sense to use the tools available to rally together, organize, and get the world’s eye on them with every intent of keeping it there until their demands have at last been met and some damn long-needed change has finally occurred. They’re going to manage what we could only dream of, tired and broken and betrayed. Godspeed to them and to all of us, all still standing despite being battered, bruised, and faced with disenfranchisement tactics by the American oligarchs at every turn.

The tools are there now. The ideas won’t be silenced. The innocent are done shedding their blood upon the altar of the NRA.