Kids Today

Don't expect the generations we keep shitting on to save us later on. We don't deserve it.

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultation
They're quite aware of what they're going through…

On our second and every subsequent viewing of The Breakfast Club, my generation read those lyrics from David Bowie on the screen and thought, "Wow. This movie really gets me." Maybe every generation feels this way, but I don't think any generation has more right to feel that kinship than the teenagers and young adults of today.

Those of us who were teenagers in the 80s were sold a bill of goods by spoiled, egocentric members of the "Me Generation," a generation whose parents had suffered through the Great Depression and had won the last "good war" as they thought of it. All their suffering had convinced the so-called "Greatest Generation" that they—and by obvious extension, their children—had earned the good times that were rolling.

Everyone went on autopilot as the markets started to determine our fate as a species, the result of which was the construction of a monster still swallowing the weakest among us to fill its bottomless gut.

But kids today aren't going to buy that bill of goods because they're saving their money. They're abstaining from sex, protesting, demanding to be offered a new path in a different direction, away from the quicksand we've been caught in for so long that we can't even grab a rope or a branch or even a vine. There is nothing to grab.

They will walk away and change the world into a place where they can live a more dignified existence while we just keep sinking into the muck. We deserve it. Don't call out for them to save us.