What we're fighting for...

a reminder from a few Gen Z's who want some damn answers.

Oh hey y’all,

Happy Tuesday. This past week I’ve been served some important reminders for why our calculated outrage at the GWM is not just important, but rather, critical. Especially when it comes to educating the future. I think one thing we can agree on is that while shit is bad now, all signs are looking to things getting a whole lot worse before they get better.

I’m teaching at an online speech and debate camp for teens. The camp is put on by Harvard, so you can imagine the uber nerds that have graced my monitor screen: they’re all very serious and hardworking. In fact, I’m not sure all of them got the memo that it was summer break. On the first day, I made the rookie mistake of asking the kids what their hobbies are (such a lame question, I know). Most of the answers varied between “I do not have hobbies, when I am done with homework, I study” to “studying is my hobby.”

As a nerd who went to college-resume building extracurricular camps when I was in high school as well, I could relate. But just because I could relate to their sad zoom summers (zummers) does not mean I wasn’t also directly responsible in inflicting even more misery on these already-hard working kids: after all, I forced them to come up with a speech and then present it, on a Saturday of all days, to a speech competition to the whole camp.

Woof, I’ve become the adult I always hated (don’t you love when life comes full circle for you like that).

Their assignment last week was to come up with an advocacy speech, and to deliver it in a way that engaged and inspired the audience to action. Here’s what these nerds chose to speak (out) about: the overturning of Roe v Wade, the loosening of air regulation in Texas and how that’s literally killing kids, how South Korea should also provide pet insurance in addition to providing human insurance (my personal fave), how teens are suffering from anxiety and depression and their aren’t enough adults to help them through it, how fad dieting is negatively impacting body perceptions on TikTok and Insta, and how systemic racism is hurting us all-- from college sports, to the NFL, to how teachers show bias in classrooms (yes, the kids pick up on it).

Listening to all of these advocacy speeches given by tired yet impassioned teens via zoom, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Gen Z. They’re inheriting a mess that just keeps getting worse. 

Now that we are probably in the 2nd week of camp, I have to admit, I’m having a hard time looking in their sad little zoom eyes. And not just for doing my job and ruining their summer vacation (dollar make me holler kids, lo siento). 

Their soft, quiet voices haunt me in my sleep, because the topics that keep coming up in our speech class have no easy answers. The kids are rightly concerned about climate change, and rightly outraged that we are still using single-use plastics. I see them struggling to understand complex issues, like Roe v Wade or why the government is doing nothing to stop massive polluters in Texas (for instance), or why the counselors at their school are inept at helping them navigate stress and anxiety (school counselors more often than not are just adults who couldn’t make the cut as teacher, imo).

As I reviewed my emotions of guilt, shame, and dread for the future, I realized that what I was really doing was asking myself: have we done enough?

The future is in high school right now, and they want some damn answers. 

As we sit through what Anne Applebaum coined as the “twilight of democracy,” in the era of late-stage capitalism, that is a question open-ended enough to keep all of us up at night (except for the GWM who sleeps just fine in his bed of lies and exploitation, that is).

So, what would you say to a teenager who has no summer break, whose hobbies include studying and attending speech & debate camps, about why the world they are inheriting is such a damn mess? 

Do you wanna look them in their sad little zoomed out eyes and say, “sorry, we tried to fix this shit, but it was really hard?” 

I mean, I never allowed that to be an excuse in my classroom, so why are we using it as a reason to wash our hands over the type of future we are handing down to the next generation? 

Finding answers to how to vanquish the GWM and his ratchet-ass legacy is not easy, but it is absolutely essential.

If we can’t do it for ourselves, perhaps we can do it for the generation coming up behind us. You know, the ones that will have even less of a social safety net and will most likely experience lasting damage from climate change, much less of the lasting damage of having to keep an unwanted pregnancy instead of continuing in school, or the lasting damage of the school to prison pipeline and how it’s disappearing an entire generation of Black and brown kids, many of whom might have some compelling solutions to any of the above clusterfucks?

So, if you find yourself getting down, thinking there’s nothing you could do anyway, think about these kids at Harvard’s speech and debate camp, being forced to write and give zoom speeches over their summer vacation. These kids don’t have excuses for not doing their work, but they do have a work ethic that we can all respect and learn from. 

Heaven forbid we end up like boomers, blaming the generation beneath them for all of the systemic issues for which their generation is responsible. Millennials are loaded up and maxed out with predatory student loans we signed when we were barely adults, get blamed for our inability to retire for bullshit things such as avocado toast, and now because we are not popping out babies at the same rate because of all the aforementioned economic reasons that the boomers spearheaded into reality, now we can’t even get a goddamn abortion, because the boomers in charge see low birth rates, and instead of fixing all the social and economic problems contributing to a low birth rate, they just fucking banned abortion LIKE THAT’S GOING TO FIX ANYTHING.

As we wait for the boomers to finally die out, let’s be careful to not become them.

Until next week, may we all thank the powers that be that we are no longer in high school, and think about what we want our legacy to be. Because right now, it’s just looking like a hot mess for all of us. 

-Allison