An Open Letter to the Class of 2020: Be the Cure

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, and know how it is. 

Walt Whitman

If everyone in the world today seems to be running around screaming like chicken little that the sky is falling, do not forget a simple lesson to be taken from it all: more than ever before in history, this is your day. Do not fear it or turn away. Rather, embrace it, for it is here to teach you some hard lessons about life, but they are the most important lessons there are, if ever you hope to understand the truth of the world you are destined to inherit, lessons that most people spend their lifetime trying to gloss over, escape, hide from, and deny. 

The world has not suddenly become a wasteland devoid of hope and possibility, even though the nightly news so often seems to only trumpet such a narrative from the rooftops. Despite what may often feel like an overwhelming fixation on how the world is coming to an abrupt and ugly end tomorrow night, six o'clock sharp, the times you live in are no more uncertain, dangerous, bleak, or disheartening, than they have been for the vast majority of people in the world, including the vast majority of Americans, who have been living under such dark clouds for months, years, and even decades and centuries, before the coronavirus ever reared its ugly head. They have just been doing so in silence. 

The coronavirus has not pulled down the stars from the sky or dimmed the power of the sun to breath life into our broken world. Far from it. It has simply stripped away the gilded veneer we rely on to hide the true brokenness of our world. That mask is your screen, where a never ending circus of illusions seduce us into believing the world is only getting better, is used to hide from you just how broken the world you are inheriting truly is, and has been for longer than history can remember.

Like an invisible hand, this virus has pulled back the curtain, as it were, to reveal the fragility and inadequacies of the systems you now find yourself confronted with, with all of its flaws and obsession with maximizing profits at all costs. A system upon which the majority of Americans are now being forced to depend as perhaps never before, which is what scares so many of them more than the virus itself. A system based on an ethos that claims the greed of the few is the best way to provide for the needs of the many, no matter how many people such a system must leave to face the mortal threat that now grips the world, without access to healthcare. And meeting the unvarnished and undiluted truth of that reality, so completely and abruptly after being thrust into the world of "adults" from the land of adolescence, can only feel like being waterboarded with a tsunami. But think of it as a baptism - a baptism of truth, in the age of advertising. 

Your generation was borne under the auspice of a year that begs you not to look away from the reality it now presents for you to see, in all of its naked truth, the scourged body of humanity itself, in order to show you the face of reality as it has shown no generation before, so you will know where the work to right the ship upon which you now find yourself stranded, needs to be done.  It is an invitation to look upon the future not as a dark dystopia, but as a blank canvas, upon which your generation must dare to create something better than those who's designs have only brought you to this point, and if necessary, create something entirely new. 

        

The world you thought you knew, the one that felt so familiar and felt like normal, was never "normal." As Brene Brown pointed out, it was a construct, intelligently designed to normalize "greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack." This fraudulent sense of "normal," as she further explains, is not something we should long to return to, since it will only ensure that we and our children will be destined to find ourselves on these desolate shores once again, sometime down the road. You must dare to believe you are the ones who can make the world a better place, but refusing to follow in the example of your parents, who's reliance on technology becomes their blind spot, preventing them from seeing how such technology is so often used to prevent the kind of political unity that can create a brave new world. It is your awareness of this, and only by your awareness of this, is anyone ever "awakened" in any meaningful sense of the word. And because of that awareness, as Brown put it so aptly, you have an opportunity to stitch a new garment, one that fits all of humanity and nature." And by so doing, stitch back together the seamless soul of humanity, that was divided into pieces at the foot of that famous cross, by soldiers throwing dice, as if they were on Wall Street.

Let your love of life outshine your fear of the unknown, and let your fear of the unknown feed your hopes and dreams into your reality, and teach you to make those hopes and dreams as much of a reality for yourselves, as for all those who, thanks to the pandemic of greed that reaps riches for some by sowing fear and poverty for many, have spent decades living under the same specter of fear and uncertainty that the world is experiencing today as a single family.  To quote the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Come my friends," for "it is not too late to seek a newer world ..with one equal temper of heroic hearts." Though we may be "made weak by time and fate," be strong in will," and together, we will learn to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," until you have something better than this.And by doing so, become the cure for an ailing world, and the light of hope for the world to come.