A robber puts a gun to the head of a millennial and says “give me your money if you want to live”, and in a single voice an entire generation responds “how bold of you to assume we both have money and want to live.’’ It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were promised hope and change, the end of the forever wars, the dawn of a post-racial America with liberty and justice for all. A decade later anyone who tries to tell you we don’t live in hellworld is trying to sell you something and half the people who admit the truth are doing it too. There’s no way out, and everyone knows it. The next recession is here, ushered in in typical 2020 fashion by a plague and a vindictive failson of a prince declaring a war against all the world. Already the panic is spreading, the dread foreboding we all live with finally made manifest in a thousand disparaging faces and a line that only points down. But we millennials have been through this before and we owe it to the next generation to warn you of what’s coming.

I am an odd messenger. The world has not yet decided if I am the youngest millennial or eldest vanguard of the Zoomers. I barely remember 2008. My middle school brain was muddled with a thousand pieces of incomprehensible jargon (mortgage-backed security, credit default swap) and a sense of raw panic as people lost their homes and jobs in numbers I never thought possible. But I remember what came after. I remember the revolutions, the occupations of the squares, those years when the earth shook under the weight of a million feet and the air was filled with chants in a dozen languages that merged seamlessly into a single voice………..

The memory brings tears to my eyes even as I write this. I remember that fleeting moment when the riot police were in retreat and it really looked, for an hour that stretched into years, like we could actually escape this hellworld, that the tyrants would fall and our generation would liberate the globe in a cascading wave that would smash the forces of the old world to bits, that from Tunisia to Greece to Brazil we’d all walk together into a new world, singing the songs we’d written in the streets. That’s when they brought out the machine guns. It started with the tanks the Saudis rolled into Bahrain in 2011, but it took me two more years to really see it. Sisi put snipers on the roof of Rabaa to kill the revolutionaries as they fled the Egyptian army. The Israelis dropped bombs on children playing soccer on the beach and followed it up half a decade later by slaughtering the unarmed crowds. The Turkish army firebombed Kurdish mayors hiding in their basements. The regime and the jihadists blasted away the last remains of Omar Aziz’s neighborhood councils in Syria and by the fourth year of the war no one could really tell who was worse. The revolution was routed everywhere and where the rubber bullet did not suffice the rubber turned to lead. We had opened a breach alright, a rupture in the society that had produced 2008. And through that breach came monsters. Duterte, Modi, Trump, bin Salman, Salvini, Bolsonaro. Call them the death spasm of the boomers consuming our future, capitalism’s self defense mechanism, the swift vengeance of the counter-revolution. They set out to exterminate us.

No one noticed the genocides at first. The people of Yemen were starved and slaughtered for years before the press finally noticed. They got a couple of the flashier ones, like when ISIS came for the Yazidi. But when the Turks rolled into Afrin and the ethnic cleansing began in earnest no one said a word. Then suddenly the camps were everywhere: Arizona, Xinjiang, Rakhine, Kashmir. Corpses floated onto the shores of Europe, we stuck our headphones in deeper to masque the sound of children screaming in cages. We fought them too, briefly, in desperate pitched battles with the police outside the camps themselves, but there were never enough of us. When the politicians told us they would abolish ICE most of us believed them and went home. The camps stayed open. You know what followed.

All around us the world burned. I recount here the greatest terrors we faced, so you are prepared for the worst of what is to come. But most of us lived in a different kind of fear, the fear you will most likely face after the recession, after the “green shoots”, after the “recovery”. You will still live in fear for the rest of your life. Fear of the day the rent is due, fear of the debt collector, fear of copays and rationing insulin to survive to the next paycheck, fear of being dragged from your house by ICE, fear of being shot in you mosque, you synagogue, your grocery school, fear of balloons popping in your school, fear of being beaten on the way back from Pride, fear of being fired, fear of being raped, fear of disappearing into the “mental health system” that conveniently doubles as a prison. That fear will define your life. It will control how you act, who you talk to, what you buy, who you’re friends with, whether or not you skateboard on the weekends. It is the very fabric of society itself, and I cannot describe the extent to which it makes your waking hours a living hell. Each day stretches into a year and each year is somehow more horrifying and more absurd than the last. Nothing ever ends, nothing ever changes, every faint flicker of hope is drowned out before it can catch fire.

There is only one way out. You can finish what we started. Together. What do we have to lose? Our jobs? Those will be gone soon enough, if we even have them at all. Our homes? We’ll never own homes, everyone knows the American dream is dead. Our lives? Do we risk the right to eek out a grim, hopeless existence in a world where the shitfaced frat boy whose shoes cost more than a months salary who now owns our life hunts refugees in the Mediterranean in his Superyacht, now eco-friendly? What is there left for us is in this fucking hell of a world? A prolonged beating until our depression overtakes us, ending our life as the debt peons of the worst people ever to live? Fuck them. Fuck them all. If we’re going to be fucking crushed into these pedophile bastards’ 3rd quarter earning report let’s go out fighting. Let’s drag the sons of bitches from their mansions and cast them into the street, storm their empty apartments and fill them with our friends on the street, lock our managers in the broom closet and take the fucking grocery stores, eat what we can and give away what we can’t. Let’s roast marshmallows on burning cop cars and the flaming ruins of their prisons, throw the world’s largest party as we light their fucking world on fire, drunk on the good shit they’ve been saving in their cellars, and when we wake in the morning, stumbling groggily in the blinding sun, we start building the new world in the ashes of the old. Seize their capital reserves and use them to keep the supply chains running, put together the community councils and the workers councils and the council to figure out of how many fucking councils we need to allocate the resources we have and make sure no one ever goes hungry again. We take back everything they’ve stolen from us, the land from the Indigenous tribes, the products of slave labor, the children ripped from their parents, the time they stole from our lives, the future they tried to burn away. We dig our hands into the dirt and we build. We plant trees and marshes and we learn what this world can support. We slash the work week (world can’t support the commutes of 20 hours, much less 40), reclaim the piles of electronics and clothes and food they’d thrown away and as the days go by we can’t tell what’s work and what’s play anymore. And as we lay on the grass watching the sunset we remember how we fucking yeeted the sick sons of bitches into the fucking sun and laugh at how hopeless it all seemed before we did.

None of this is possible, of course. The world is the way it is. We can’t change it. We did all we could, and you will too, and it won’t matter in the end because our leaders betrayed us and there weren’t any better ones. Maybe you’ll fight, but they’ll beat you in the streets and murder your friends until you don’t go out anymore. Go home. Buy local, vote every two years, eat, shit, and die. That’s all we can do. It’s all we can ever do. You’re just the next corpse on top of the pile, and there was never any hope anything would turn out otherwise. Remember this feeling. Hope being snatched away and crushed by the grey and utter depression of reality. It’s what’s waiting for us all. There is no alternative.

Unless…………