Open Letter to "Generation Screwed"

Dear Generation Screwed,

Where are you?

Haven't heard or seen anything from you while the Bush Administration drives you, your children, and your children's children into perpetual war and debt.

Don't see you at meetings. Don't read you on the op-ed pages. Can't even find you on the Internet, Nothing. Not even a text message. What's up with that?

And you really are screwed, you know. These jokers are borrowing the money to fund the war in Iraq, and putting your name down as co-signer. They're not raising taxes to pay for it. They're borrowing it.

Who do you think is going to pay all that back with interest? Not George Bush. Not Dick Cheney. Not the huge international corporations who are profiting from the war. Not the Baby Boom. No.

You are. You're going to pay it back. You and your children and your children's children. Some estimates say it'll be more than $2 trillion before they're through with Iraq.

A billion is a thousand million. A trillion is a thousand billion. That's one million million. $2 trillion is $2 thousand billion - $2 million million. Not counting interest.

You are so screwed. You're screwed eight ways from Tuesday, Monday through Friday and time and a half on weekends. You're screwed at school, on the job, in the housing market and at the store. And when you get old, you can look forward to spending your golden years screwed, too.

So where are you? Down in the basement trading bong hits and playing Guitar Hero?

Following the click ...

My comment - I came of age in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War Protests. I marched with the Congress of Racial Equality in Syracuse, New York, protesting the racist hiring policies of Niagara Mohawk, the regional power company. Friends of mine volunteered as medics at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Other friends were drafted and died in the war. Those who returned were never the same. I was a draft resister during the war. I protested injustice then and I've very concerned now as I watch the current crop of young people totally absorbed in themselves and totally unconcerned about where we are collectively headed.

My generation changed the world and, because we didn't have all those lovely luxuries like cell phones, the Internet, computers, digital cameras and a myriad of other things you take for granted ... we invented them.

You are now faced with a crisis. It is a crisis that will effect you for the rest of your life and for the duration of the lives of your children and your children's children.

If you don't take control of your destiny, someone else will. And if you let that happen, you may not like where they take you.