Rise, My Generation

I turned fifty-six today. Who is my generation?

We were born on the cusp between the Baby Boom and Generation X. We were under-represented, overlooked, stranded in a demographic dip.

We are the children of terror. We grew up in the shadow of the Bomb. We lay awake at night listening for the sound, the sound we knew we wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t live to wake up from. What did we care about Cold War ideology? All it meant to us was death, death, death. Our fiction was a panorama of planets nuked to nothingness.

We are the children of the backlash. We saw the seventies roll back everything the sixties promised. The hand on the wheel shifted grips but did not change its course.

We came of age under neocon whips. We came of age during the war on drugs. We saw the start of mass incarceration and the militarization of police. We saw the black and brown bodies of our generation broken on the streets and chained in the forever jails.

We came of age into the constriction of the middle class. Squish, the money shot upward into the hands of the already wealthy. Squash, the people were forced down into poverty. The song of our age was the sound of doors closing.

We came of age in the great plague. We learned that lives are not created equal; we saw how to blame sickness on the ill and contagion on moral deficiency. We were told there was a difference between the innocent victim and the guilty one. We came to blame ourselves for everything bad that happens to us.

This is how we learned to internalize oppression. This is how we learned to excuse the system. They tranquilized us with the myth of meritocracy, the sedative of self-determination. They sold us the story of a post-racial society.

We saw the Berlin Wall come down. We learned the world could change.

We got tax reforms that crippled public education, public health. We got private prisons built by billionaires in the making. They took away our music and replaced it with the Song Machine. We began to see strange weather round the world, but we did not yet know what to fear. We celebrated the defeat of the Y2K bug and welcomed in the new millennium.

What was slouching toward us but a new and never-ending war? That’s where this century began for me: the wrong fight for the wrong reason, the price too high and built on lies. My age-mates, we were old enough then to know better, old enough then to fight back.

What was slouching toward us wrecked a city when it came ashore. We saw hundreds left to die in the flood, thousands homeless in the aftermath. We began to know: it was only the beginning. In the next decade we would learn new words for weather and new colors for disaster.

We saw a Black President elected. We learned the world could change.

We rode out the Great Recession as the first generation to learn we could never afford our parents’ standard of living. We knew permanent employment was a myth and a life-long career was a chimera. We lived the reality of multiple part-time jobs and shared breadwinning, though we women still worked an unpaid second shift.

They tell us mindfulness will solve all our troubles, that positive energy will fix the world. Look to your own inner state, ignore everything outside you: the hand on the wheel, the hand on the whip, the man behind the curtain. Siblings of my birth years, aren’t we tired of the same old lies?

The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 115th Congress was 57.8 years; of Senators, 61.8 years. I am fifty-six today. My generation, our time is now. Let us not fail of our promise. Let us remember everything we’ve learned.

Age-mates, I prophesy: We are the last generation where only white hands will hold power. We are the last generation to deny the truths the planet tells us. If we are not fit to lead, beloved siblings, at least we know whom we ought to follow.

Rise, my generation
Rise, my generation
Rise, my generation, rise!

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