Millennials: are you mad enough yet?

If I were a millennial, defined by millennialgeneration.org as the generation born between roughly 1982 and 2002, I would be furious. Baby boomers like myself were also pretty upset with our "greatest generation" parents for leaving us with a mess to clean up that began with Vietnam and various forms of air and water pollution and issues that included racism, sexism, and countless others. But somewhere along the line, our anger and outrage became softened with age, our customs and dress framed as silly, and our causes cynically panned as naive and facilitated by comfort and the wealth of our parents. Even my cohort of the late 1970's had a few chuckles at the expense of the aging hippies and began to view college as a means to get rich in the market. By the time I went to graduate school, the Reagan Revolution was in full swing and it was way cool to be a real estate developer or Gordon Gekko wannabe. Greed was in fashion again.

So any lessons learned by the oil crises of 1973 or 1979 or the burning of the Cuyahoga were put in the attic with the rest of the lace curtains, bell bottoms, and other remnants of quaint but irrelevant times gone by. Nearly 28 years have been wasted through both Republican and Democratic administrations that didn't take climate change or dependence on foreign oil and now peak oil nearly seriously enough. And now you Millennials are set to inherit a vastly more degraded natural and human World. The resources that we are leaving you with are less pure, the ecosystems far less functional and diverse, and there are far more of you than many of us felt reasonable to occupy a sustainable planet. Good luck. I personally hope that you have more sense than my peers did as a whole and that you recognize the plight you are in. But even more than mere recognition of the situation that you're left with, you should be incensed that we thought so little of you that we squandered the very essences of survival that you will need for a fulfilling, rich, and rewarding life. You will be lucky enough to have sufficient clean water, clean air, and arable land for feed yourselves and stay reasonably healthy. There is so much toxic contamination of the lands and buildings in our communities Worldwide that you will be fortunate not to contract cancer.

Sure, you were pampered and spoiled with electronic gadgets and private schools that helped institutionalize the very pathways that led to where we are today via Wall Street greed and corruption. But what we failed to do was be responsible enough stewards to leave you with a society that did not have an energy peak, climate crisis, ecological ruination, and a social and cultural wasteland. Worse still, we are denying that these problems even exist and frankly our political and economic institutions are working frantically to mask these realities so that profits do not suffer. You were not taught the important subjects that could have led you to understand how the natural world functions. You were not given an opportunity to learn the skills necessary to cope with hard times or an energy challenged future.

So you should be apoplectic with us. You should have the latest moral claim with the dominant culture as previous generations bore a responsibility to Native Americans and African Americans. Yet your claim is even more acute and the threat is to the very survival of the species. Consider the moral and political power you would have if these three groups banded together to demand a recognition of grievances and a course correction to a sustainable and socially just World. This may be the last best opportunity you have, that we have, all of us working in conjunction to make it right.