These kids go to school and have to deal with the very plausible possibility that they won’t come home, because some asshole might decide he wants his fifteen minutes of fame and chose to get it with a gun. They have to practice active shooter drills. They have to watch the news and see the faces of other kids who died just because they went to school. And many of them have already developed anxiety, depression, and PTSD because of it.
Live through a depression?
The housing crisis and economic crash of 2008 has all but destroyed the middle class. These kids are looking at bleak-ass futures where the price of an education might destroy them, and where the education itself doesn’t give them any kind of guarantee of a decent job with a livable wage because billionaire-owned megacorporations would rather see their workers starve than face the thought of losing a few points in the “who has more money” race.
These kids live with the very real fact that our planet is on fucking fire and no one with enough power to do anything about it seems willing to bother.
They live with the fact that we’re having a resurgence of Nazi and Fascist ideals in what is supposed to be the ‘land of the free.’ They live with the fact that we are putting refugees--many of them children like they are--in cages and letting them die of things like the flu. They’re watching grown-ass adults bring back plagues rather than risk their children developing autism because some asshole faked a study and said vaccines and autism were linked. They’re watching women’s bodily autonomy and gay and trans rights being stripped away one law at a time. They’re watching black and brown people get gunned down by policemen with little to no accountability, and watching their grandparents die because they can’t afford their next insulin shot.
These kids are literally living with the prospect of a planet that might be uninhabitable in another generation or two, an economy that might well collapse, a wage minimum that promises they’ll need 2-3 jobs just to make ends meet, an education system that is making college an elite and impossible goal, and a bunch of back-water bigoted policy making its way to the supreme court and getting upheld.
These kids are perfectly capable of seeing and understanding the fact that things are falling down around them but are powerless to do anything about it, and you’re going to freak out about them expressing their frustration at older generations with an innocuous and harmless phrase? And you’re seriously going to sit there and pretend it’s just that these kids don’t like to be told they’re wrong?
Yeah, I’m with the kiddos on this one:
