Monday, December 19, 2011

What I said to be told, "Grow up and get over yourself."

[Originally posted at Slacktivist.]
[Normally I wouldn't repost a non-story post here, but this time I'm doing it because it for a couple of reasons, mostly because it ties into how not to respond to depression.]

[For some context, "Millennials" refers to a generation, definitions of it vary somewhat, some people say it starts with people born in the mid 1970s and ends with people born in the mid 1990s, the other extreme states that it starts with those born in 1982 and ends with those born in 2001.  Regardless I'm in it.]

So now that I've been, apparently, tasked with saving the world I have something I'd like to say.  Things would be a lot easier if you guys had a least provided some decent healthcare.
It's not the need to fix the infrastructure, and the tax code, and the schools, and the banks (good God, the banks), and campaign finance, and politics as a whole, and poverty, and hunger (which will probably be tied up with fixing poverty at least somewhat), and the environment, and various forms of bigotry (good work on several of those by the way), or the fact that child labor is now seriously back on the table, or ... you know: the entire economic system in which we live, or any of a thousand other things in need of fixing that gets to me.

It's that I'm here reading that my generation will need to fix all this while I have untreated depression.

My sister is with the local Occupy at the moment, she's actually been meeting with the Mayor (so if things go badly blame her), before that she touched base with Boston, New York, and DC.  (If you look at the Barn-thing DC put up you'll see an IWW cat painted on the side, she painted it.)  She's currently very active in trying to change things.

She would have been trying to make things better long before, but she was busy holding down a soul crushing job at an anti-union company.  She didn't have a choice, she needed the healthcare.  (Right now I'm pretty sure she's doing without at the moment and hoping for the best, that's not a sustainable plan.)

We aren't exactly isolated cases.  Healthcare is a pretty major concern for a lot of us millennials. What pisses me off isn't so much the fact that previous generations seemed to want to party at the expense of the welfare of the country and let us clean up the mess (I say staring disdainfully at the ghost of Ronald Wilson Reagan) it's that we were expected to clean it up while sick.


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Ok, so there you have my post.  I didn't say that I wouldn't save the world.  It's just a lot of work do when you're sick.  I'm pretty sure that a lot of people would be pissed off with just the whole, "Your ran this country, and indeed much of this planet, into the ground and now you want us to fix it?" thing in itself.

And here's the response, with the formatting cleaned up because the guy couldn't post very well:

It's that I'm here reading that my generation will need to fix all this while I have untreated depression. 
What pisses me off isn't so much the fact that previous generations seemed to want to party at the expense of the welfare of the country and let us clean up the mess (I say staring disdainfully at the ghost of Ronald Wilson Reagan) it's that we were expected to clean it up while sick. 
Which is exactly why so many despair of the Millennials changing the world - your priority isn't changing the world, it's getting something for yourself.  Somehow, the world has changed radically without the preconditions you insist one... So the problems aren't in your stars Horatio, it's in yourself.  Grow up and get over yourself.
I'll be sticking my response to that into a later post.

1 comment:

  1. Wait, thinking that everyone should have healthcare is immature and greedy. What The Everliving Fuck!?

    I say this as someone who just got served because I owe $8259 to a collection agency because of a $5979 medical bill I got while fucking unemployed. Pardon me while I go metaphorically hit that guy with something big and heavy.

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