An Apology to Young People… and the Good News

Dear Young People, we’re sorry for the incredibly bad world we’re turning over to you.

I previously wrote a self-graded report of this handover, and gave ourselves “so-so” marks. But it’s now the end of the semester and that early evaluation was optimistic. We’ve failed you miserably. Ultimately I will try to make the case that you should remain optimistic, but first the apology.

• We’re sorry for giving you authoritarianism and its bedmate, fascism. America was free of this disease of civilization for 250 years, but we fucked it up. Sorry.
• We’re sorry we inexorably destroyed the best place in the universe for DNA to thrive and reach its full potential, “life,” in all its splendor. Oopsy. But surely my boomer generation must get to share this disaster with the previous two generations who created all that greenhouse-insulating gas, right? We boomers simply stuck our heads in our bank vaults and failed to correct it.
• We’re sorry for perverting the economy to the point that college has put many of you in hopeless debt for all eternity. (Did you know that the founding fathers were more fearful of money lenders than of invaders, for exactly this reason?) And that home ownership is no longer the American dream but the American nightmare.
• We’re sorry that healthcare is a roulette spin, where one prays for a top-tier job, and that losing the gamble means exorbitant expenses called ‘healthcare bankruptcy.’
• We’re sorry that that childhood daycare is like a ransom payment.
• What did I leave out? Did I forget anything? Oh, yes, piecework. We’ve perfected Uber and a thousand look-alike business models that put all of the expenses of a business on the worker. As the Brits say, “brilliant!” Or, in the more articulate words of a business pundit, loosely quoting, ‘Uber’s business model is worker abuse.’
• And on a related business-world matter, we’re sorry that we created — we get 100% credit — for a world where you are at the invisible, unaccountable, uncommunicative mercy of computers… where companies hide behind them whether for job interviews, customer service, of outright financial responsibility. You’re welcome.

I’ll stop. I’ve dug the hole deep enough. But this one geezer is truly sorry. I’ve written that ours has been the greediest generation, stealing from our children. I’ve only recently come to understand that this is but one more example of technology being the explanation to almost everything in the world’s problems… that and the Baby Boom.

The boom is the numerical tsunami overwhelming many markets and phenomena across the Western world. And here’s my new understanding: technology makes it increasingly possible for each generation to hoard its wealth from the next! As one simple and admittedly trite example, consider refrigerators: without them all farming products must be distributed, not consumed by the grower. Every other aspect of technology has an equivalent if less direct effect. But I digress, so it’s time for the good news.

There’s a saying, “May you live in interesting times,” that has no certain source, but is now taken to be a sarcastic curse about living in a time of turmoil. Well, young generation, you live in interesting times. And that’s where I start my notion of a silver lining. You’ll get through this, and I predict that America will get past its little authoritarian temper tantrum, and whipsaw, as usual, to another wave of egalitarianism… along with more distributed wealth. And you’ll be the ones who own it, the bounce back.

The boomers will forever be the selfish assholes who hoarded their housing wealth… defunded education so its children were indentured slaves to our banks… dismantled the pension-era corporations and relegated our youth to the piecework of Uber and its ilk… replaced a stable stock market with the craps table of crypto… and scorched the Earth. Sorry.