I was thinking about this just yesterday. After watching Frankie’s cultural observation on boomers, where he says that “boomers are the first generation in history that wanted to do better than their children”, I asked myself what have us millennials done. I settled on this, we broke the generational cycle of abuse and bullying of our kids. The boomers parents, while the “greatest” generation, were raised by an even stricter generation of parents who believed in things like not picking up a crying baby, and probably resulted in Boomer parents that, thanks to WW2, were also an untreated PTSD generation. Alcoholism was just dad’s being dad’s and pre ww2 moms stayed home to keep home and hearth with a little help from the snuff tin. Several generations of war torn parents ignorant of how to deal with what they went through, raising more kids for the next war. From the civil war to Vietnam, every generation had a war or two on their plate. Then our small communities were randomly spread out into suburban experiments to support the industrial revolution. Now no one knows their neighbor, they just go to work. Then the millennials were sent to war. We had heard the stories growing up about how great our nations fighting forces were. Now it was our turn. We had the most righteous of reasons to fight. But this time, when looking to the boomers to lead us, we found a bunch of disfunctional brats. Their maturity was a ruse. They didn’t know any better than we did on how to deal with this world. Their parents won the great war, setup the economy, spanked them, never hugged them, and then handed them the keys to the company and retired to Florida. So the bratty boomers without a clue bullied their kids out the door and into the world. There we stood, 18 and primed to take it on. But there was nothing left to take. Then the bubble they blew popped and we shipped out to Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and even after 20 years we still had nothing to show for it. No house, no good paying job, no health care, and a degree with the weight of never ending debt chained to it. The boomers are and always have been, brats. You see them out there on their Harley’s brrrraaaaatttting around. So when we started having kids, we said no. No we’re not going to beat our kids, no we’re not going to shame them for who they love, no we’re not going to “be a man” and shut up about our war trauma. But the brats still had all the power. They refused to let go of their toy. So we put ourselves to work on trying to fix the only thing we had the power to fix, ourselves. We started normalizing therapy, researching drug and alcohol addiction. We dug into the data. We acted like adults, we admitted we have a problem and we did the rigorous and SCIENTIFIC work of finding the solutions. We broke the cycle. We’ve really earnestly tried to raise thoughtful, honest about themselves, proud adults who ask why. We didn’t ignore them, we answered them honestly, we admitted there’s a problem. But we don’t have enough time to set it right in our life time. The brats won’t let go. We need Gen Z to carry the torch forward. Question everything, do the hard work, admit when you were wrong, be willing to change your mind when new data is discovered. I’m proud of these kids. I want them to do better than us. We got your back kid.