If you knew the stories of debt most of you have saddled my generation with, those of you without antisocial personality disorders wouldn't be able to sleep at night. My parents basically live like Puritans, so I'm one of the lucky ones. Whatever the solution is, life has blessed 67 million of you beyond any demographic of people in the history of this planet. You've lived your entire lives on the expectation that life would work out, you promised your kids that life would treat them the same way, and every decision your generation cheered on ensured it wouldn't from upper class and capital gains tax cuts to the repeal of Glass-Steagall to the slashing of welfare and education funding to the belief that Democrats and Republicans exist in a state of moral parity; and let's not even get started on tech utopianism and global warming procrastination. This is on you. My generation is now dealing with the shock that life will not work out for the majority of us just as we have our own children whom we have to prepare for a hundred gathering storms without any example for how to do so still in living memory. You created this mess and once we try to get out from under it, you complain about something for nothing. You are the something for nothing generation, and after Vietnam, there was no sacrifice asked for you. Many of us may be asked to provide the last full measure of devotion to our children and grandchildren, far more than passed in Vietnam. We will do so happily, but knowing that we only have the example of previous generations who are now departed, who provided the world from which you reaped unprecedented rewards while going decades without thinking how you could pay it forward.
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