Lament for a Generation

I am young, intelligent, educated, experienced. I have passion and ideas, vision and insights. I am gifted, beautiful, resourceful, refined, gracious and compassionate. I am strong and resilient, hard-working, motivated and empowered. I am intellectually and emotionally attuned. I respect diversity of background and opinion. I embrace change and technology and look boldly to the future, but recognize the lessons of history.

I am a number, a statistic, irrelevant, invalidated. I am unemployed, underemployed, unpaid. I am tired, weak, broken, fragile. I am homeless, wandering, searching, not finding. I am broke, in debt, past-due. I am losing hope, hopeless. I photocopy, staple, file, Excel, but I don't excel. I am undervalued, disowned, shut out and shut down. I am rejected, dejected, forgotten. I am lost.

"My Body's a Zombie For You"

There are only stories with pain. We need pain to learn, and a story needs lessons to matter.

Screaming and crying and broken glass and broken hearts - it's not worth it. It's too much. Love is as much of a construct as any ideology or religion or cultural custom that is qualified and deconstructed in every university classroom. We know better, but we still believe. We have to believe.

If there's anything in the world we believe in purely and truly, it is love. And we believe over and over and over again, even when love shoots us in the face and we lose so much blood that we almost don't make it.

It takes months - sometimes years - for the wounds to heal, and the scars never completely fade, but fuck, we still believe.

And worse: we hope. We desperately reach out our arms with tears in our eyes and pain in our chests and a rush of blood to our crotches, and we grab for that tortuously elusive someone that will fill our hearts and our holes and makes it all worth it.

But is it? Is it really worth it when so often in the end at least one of us decides that it is, in fact, not worth it at all. Not anymore.

Sometimes it makes for a good story. Good, perhaps only if we still believe. And deep down, we do believe, don't we? Don't you?