written awhile ago...

We

We who are the prodigious children of the 80’s
Progeny of the Baby Boomers

Well-bred
Well read
Well educated on the thoughts of rich white men

We have been provided with the teats of an economic boom
Suckling lulls us to sleep
Snoring even as we eat

We have a hard time spurning the milk we were raised on.

And we yearn for revolution
We yearn for the day that life is so intolerable that we pack our bags and head for the train station
Buy a ticket to who-the-hell-knows
Fast.
Sleep on bus station floors next to the homeless philosopher and pastor bum
From whom we will learn life’s secrets,
to whom we will confess the matter of our privilege

And curled up with the pile of dirt from the push broom’s ceaseless sweeping
We are worried that this hurt is perhaps what we deserve
But we’ll never say it because we are the Ivy educated golden but decimated

children of the 80’s.

Finding ourselves. Finding our spot in a world that cries out for revolution so badly with each creak and groan and honk and yet those of us who

have the time and space and youth and energy

We are the prodigious, sacreligious children of the 80’s

We are the children of the American cheese product
Of the NFL
The woodchuck mini-van

So now,

We experiment with giving away our possessions. We experiment with the isms and trappings of the ability to choose to experiment with the isms and trappings. We wear our causes on our sleeves.

Our hearts hurt, but our heads hurt more.
We beat them against the stop lights as the green urges us forward, ever forward.

We grieve. But we grieve silently, quietly, shamefully because we fear that if someone were to hear us, the sniffling from the back stall of that bus station bathroom, that they might call us out as the polluted revolutionaries that we are.

We are tainted commanders. We constantly look over our shoulders in the perpetual fear that they will know,

That they will know that we were breastfed by the enemy herself.

That they will look in our closets and see our shoes. Worse yet, that they might glance into our cars (our cars!) and find the detritus from a covert McDonald’s expedition. Are we the hypocrites, whose Newman’s Own coffee cup with sleeve and plastic top lie next to the dumpstered Odwalla bars and homemade hummus container?

….

(to be continued…)