the transitional generation

We have a generation of siblings. We lost some of them recently - the government killed them. I watched it happen. I can’t believe they murdered our poet sister Renee and our nurse brother Alex, and we had to watch it, and now we have to live without them. I can’t believe our brother Keith was shot by an off-duty agent at the very end of the year and we only hear about it in whispers because Keith is a Black Man and racism has poisoned this entire experiment.

We crossed a millennium together and we watched towers fall then graduated into the ruins. We are nursing our elders and raising our children in a world that values neither, and yet…

We were just children when a world wide web tethered us to our siblings across the globe. Their hot takes and their favorite recipes, their dances and their suffering. We connected our hearts to theirs and I have never looked back.

Do you know, brothers and sisters, that all of the other children belong to us now? It is our duty to protect them. They can’t survive without us.

I’ll tell you this: Millennials protest like we dance: with our hands in the air. All we want is to live our lives and celebrate, so don’t shoot.

We are the helpers that Mr. Rogers told us to look for - now we’re the ones being looked for. We go to the front lines, and then we come home to make dinner, pay bills. Watch “Great British Bakeoff”, help with homework, respond to text threads. Pace the floor at midnight, anxious to greet a new tomorrow.

We are the adultiest adults now, and that won’t be true forever. What do we want to say to each other, our descendants, and our ancestors about what we did with these ripe and urgent days?