Radical Hope by Radical Hope (epub)

Author:Radical Hope (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

DEAR MILLENNIALS

Aya de León

Dear Millennials,

We weren’t really lying, because we believed it at the time. We told you to work hard in school as young people. We buried you in homework. When you wanted to spend time with your friends, we acted like you were throwing away your future. All with the promise that if you graduated from a good college, you’d be set for life.

We told many of you that you weren’t college material. We watched others of you try to go to college, and it didn’t work out. We sighed. No good life for you. Because college was the gateway to all nice things. Focus on your studies, and don’t rack up credit card debt. Student loans? That’s different. Educational debt pays for itself. We weren’t really lying, because we believed it at the time.

College used to be something only owning-class white men could afford. So if others managed to get those degrees, it put them on an elite track. But as increasing numbers of the masses gain access to higher education, there’s no simultaneous increase in the number of professional, living-wage jobs for them after they graduate. The system originally designed to benefit the minds and futures of wealthy young white men can’t be effortlessly shifted to work for women, people of color, and poor / working-class folks. People of color go to college and feel daily the slice of microaggressions. Poor and working-class kids go to college and get the message that they are intellectually inferior. Young women go to college and get sexually harassed and assaulted. The traumas of these communities in higher education betray the roots of the institution and those for whom it was originally designed to work.

We older folks don’t know how to divest from the myth, so we grin and say, Just keep at it! during your despair-filled job searches with your bachelor’s/master’s/PhDs. We even have the nerve to blame those of you who didn’t go to college, when you face an even bleaker employment picture. See? If only you’d gone to college, you could compete with a hundred other qualified applicants for that one interesting, living-wage job. We promised that your hard work would pay off. We thought we were telling the truth.

Another big lie is that we know. We know what’s best for you. We know what you should do with your lives. With your money. We definitely know that you should slow it down in your sex lives.

The truth is not that we know. The truth is that we worry. We worry about your choices, because we’re anxious about our own choices. Our own finances. Our own debt. Our own frustrated career aspirations. Our own love and sex lives.

And then there was voting. We thought we could bully you into our voting patterns. We dismissed your commitment to a higher standard of social justice as naïve and unrealistic. And, if you were female, we feminist-shamed you for disloyalty to the female candidate. On behalf of all older adults, I want to say you didn’t deserve any of this.

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