TIMOTHY L. HAVENER

Mill Hall

“You can be anything!”

Kids of my generation believed this with wide-eyed expectation, and what could we have known any differently?

Our world in the ’80s as we developed into adolescents was full of the excesses of capitalism. Enough of the faded lie that was the American Dream was still standing to allow us to buy into it.

Growing up in Western Pennsylvania in my younger years, I was surrounded by the contrasting narratives of living in the greatest country in the world, and a steady downward spiral in the manufacturing sector leaving some Americans behind.

The cracks were beginning to show.

I was raised as a conservative, so I had it drilled into my head that you get what you earn.

Everybody gets a chance in America, but not everybody succeeds, right?

What seemed like an innocent bit of wisdom in my younger years became a tool to gaslight the suffering of others, to steal my outrage for change.

Being an older member of the Millennial generation bordering on Generation X, I watched with apprehension as the economic footing for my generation started to crumble.

As I grew older, I began to notice that I could not get by on what I once could just a decade ago. Everything was getting more expensive, but employers weren’t keeping pace.

Along with less pay and longer hours, corporations began to cut benefits across the board. Health care became a luxury for many people, and even when we got Obamacare, many Americans still couldn’t and can’t afford co-pays or medication.

This leads to people with health care coverage with preventable illnesses who end up not getting proper care.

Housing, which was once the guarantee of the American Dream, rose and rose out of reach until it has now become a near luxury itself.

Rentals have also become so expensive that a large number of millennial workers are living in temporary housing or tent cities while they are working multiple jobs with no health care.

I have quite literally watched the lie of the American Dream crumble before my eyes.

My heart has broken for those I see around me who struggle while I watch those who came before us glare judgmentally.

I don’t feel hate toward Boomers for all this. I feel deep sorrow. You have hurt us so bad. You took the promise given to you and then stole it from your children whom you condemn as lazy and unfit.

They cook your food, fix your car, serve you at the register, and after 80 hours of work and not enough money to afford food, they have to listen to you mock and ridicule them as lazy.

The suicide rate among millennials is skyrocketing. Children of even younger generations are expressing that they are losing the will to live.

This is not who we have to be.

We can do better.

My friends are dying of preventable illnesses, and my children have no future: This is what it means to be a millennial in America in 2018.