A Letter of Love for the Millennial Crowd
You are probably reading this on your bed at 7 am as you try to wake up to a new day. You’ll continue looking at your screen for the next hour as you get up and get dressed. You stumble onto someone’s pictures of their trip to Ibiza as you microwave your oatmeal. You’ll place a heart on it as you silently renew the resolve to travel one day. But as for today, you have to catch your morning bus before it’s too late. There aren’t many who can walk around the streets anymore in some parts of the world like yours.
Everyone has deemed it as too unsafe, for gone are the days of peaceful and calm summer mornings when kids could stroll in groups on green footpaths along skimpy morning traffic and it wouldn’t shock any adults. The cities aren’t as green as they were before either. Your parents often like to point out blocks of building to you and then explain how there were only trees and open grounds here before, where they would host their cricket rivalries on every afternoon. Now, as you look outside from your car, you see a brown choking haze engulfing the once blue city sky, and there are rows and rows of squatted houses and raging traffic all dressed down with heaps and heaps of dumped away plastics. This reminds you of that cleaning drive coming up ahead for which you have passionately campaigned for online for the entire past week. You can’t wait to volunteer and see a place transformed by your action.
At College, you are a part of a crowd who is being furiously fed down books and books of data and being told that GPA does and does not entirely matters at the same time. Inside classrooms you hear how unless you don’t do well in every test and every quiz, you’ll never end up getting that scholarship you can only dream of or of getting that dream job once all of this is through. Outside of classrooms, you see everyone pressured into a rat race to manage the most
credentials on their plates that they call as CVs for their career paths. You submissively take up any unpaid internship that you can scoundrel for in the murky economy of today but your appetite for work may never ever be satiated as you will find yourselves fetching cups of coffees and printed copies while you’re there. Still, you sign up for it all as the thought of appearing in a job interview as one person out of the hundreds of others for only one slot haunts you. No matter what field you choose, it appears as though none of them might have a promising future. You hear the adults rant out at you at how there are no jobs left at their institutions out for you, and how the economy, the government and the international façade of global politics would all fail you.
Still, you make it through your day. I suspect it is due to the fiery optimism you all contain. It’s almost to the point of insanity, yet it’s also so poetically courageous, how the generation of you is hell bent on changing the whole world and is so unafraid of redefining how you’re told to live. In spite of all your worries and your anxieties, you still manage to care so much of so many. You scream and hold play cards for the minorities and underrepresented factions around you. You go out and stand in solidarity to people of different colors and races from you. You care so much of your ultimate home, the Planet Earth and those who inhabit it with you. You plant trees as your seeds for a
new and better future. You ditch diamonds as your adornments because you are aware of how they’re mined unethically and at the cost of human lives. You show up on polling days as swarms in all your countries, even though you may have been neglected by the typhoons that have been making polices for you. You make it a point to be more kind and inclusive when you speak to others. You have given up so many expressions in languages because you understood that they can be painful stereotypical biases against the others. You never shy away from speaking up for another somebody’s rights, and you have helped entire communities to rebuild their claim in the world. You know the times are tough in every way, but you are the generation born from the ashes of the burnt Twin Towers of 9/11 and so you know that the only thing that turns a barren land to a patch of green once again is a seed of hope and a nurturing hand.
So carry on, my dear friend, as a sturdy ship riding gallantly out on a rocky sea wave towards the shore of a better, bright day.
