An Open Letter to Generation X – It’s Time to Get Off Your Phone and Get Into the Revolution
By: Lisa M. Hayes – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
Dear Generation X’ers,
I get it, I really do. Life isn’t as simple as it once was. Things haven’t been simple in our lives since Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi fell off the top 40 charts. Bon Jovi is a retired restaurant owner now. Times have changed.
In fact, at this point, for lots of us, life is complicated. We are the very definition of the sandwich generation – taking care of every-fucking-thing from kids to aging parents and all of it in between. It’s a lot. However, a lot just can’t be an excuse anymore.
As Gen X’ers, we’ve always had a natural excuse for everything that’s gone wrong. Those damn baby boomers, otherwise known as the children of the Greatest Generation, those people left us a world much more complicated than the one they inherited. The baby boomers, with all of their white-haired, power-wielding men, and all of their broken institutions left us with a world that was more challenging than any of them anticipated – and we’ve done alright.
We’ve put dinner on the table. We got jobs. We got our kids to kindergarten and college. We’re taking care of our parents, being lady bosses at work, and going to the PTA meetings all at the same time. However, while we’ve been tending to the never-ending details of our lives, some shit is going down around us. The fact that we’ve got our noses to the grindstone is not an excuse not to pick up our heads and look around.
Look around.
Baby boomers are dying.
Millennials are changing everything.
Those kids who are younger than the millennial generation are taking no shit, and they have no time for our excuses. They are moving on without us. They’ll leave us behind if we’re not careful.
The largest and most potent protests and rallies in our planet’s history have been happening, attended mostly by aging hippies, those pesky Millennials, and their magical younger siblings. While we’re trying to coordinating the carpool and schedule doctor’s appointments, those other people are out organizing movements to save our democracy and our planet. Even Bon Jovi’s restaurant is a mini-revolution, feeding homeless people and providing for his community.
The media talks about us as if we don’t exist. There is a massive cultural discussion about the juxtaposition between the boomers and the millennials. You can’t scroll your Facebook feed for more than ten minutes without reading something about how the Millenials are taking over – because they are. They are taking over the world by themselves because they have to – the Gen Xer’s have mostly checked out, hiding from the world, buried in the day to day of their lives, thinking we are up-to-date because we scroll the Facebook feed that’s regularly labeling us irrelevant.
We’re leaving the revolution to our children, and while they are capable, that’s not fair. It’s time we put being woke on the schedule.
Not all of us can dawn forward focus protest fashion and hit the streets – but many of us can. However, all of us can get our asses to the polls to vote. We can vote with the dollars we’re spending to support businesses and people who are doing good work. We can join or even start conversations that lift up minorities and disadvantaged communities. We can get off the #metoo train, because that has long since left the station, and start walking the talk of #neveragain because a hashtag is powerless without action.
If this is the battle between the outdated ideology of the boomers and the vision of the millennials, although our numbers may be smaller, we will be the deciding vote between the past and future. The voices of Gen Xer’s may the most important voices and votes of all. History will tell the story of what we did or didn’t do with those votes and our voices.
It’s time to get off the fence out from behind our phone screens.
The revolution is happening now, and it has very little to do with the soccer schedule.
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