You’ll always blame our generation.

How we’re spoiled by participation awards and phone radiation.

How the minds are too loopy and the offence too stupid.

How the girls are racey and the dress isn’t lacey.

How the music is trash and the literature rash and how we’re all rotting within our own minds.

You praise your hard education and harder ground at playtime. Long, lace dresses that cover the ankles, and materials that wind long and wise. As if you were responsible for the trends of that time, as if the ones before you didn’t laugh at how you rhyme.

They said your swimsuits were too revealing and your music unappealing and Dickens didn’t live in your time. Think of past you. Wouldn’t they rebel against you? Wouldn’t they wear the new shorts with pride? Even if you didn’t mingle in the crowd, you still lived with the times of the old. If you hate the Beatles they’ll say you’re uncultured and crude, so don’t even try to be lewd.

The world still turns if you say something edgy, with no mind to a dusty old Scrooge. You had your own comforts, and I have my own, and yet you can’t leave me alone. We vote for your generation in every election, and yet then say that the choices are poor. Why can’t you leave me to my music and friends and wander your own lost moor?

You call an entire generation stupid and lazy when maybe it's not our fault. Maybe it's the system oiled by insufficient funds that requires us to do homework even if we have a concussion. Maybe more and more of us are dying by our own hands because you tore apart the economy so now we have low standards that are still impossible. If I say I want a spacious apartment with good light and a nearby corner store and to afford good furniture for it, more than a mattress on a floor, my generation is the one who understand even from the age of 10 that that is no longer quite possible.

You killed the economy then threw the corpse at us and blamed it on Obama. So what do you want us to do? Change the whole system, uproot your generation, try to come back from a grave dug for our whole duration? You listen to every sly comment you hear, pass it and add it to an army of fear. Vaccines will cause autism, and all Islam is ISIS. The police are in danger and the black caused the crisis. You spill these words and teach them to us, closing your ears at every rebuke and cuss. Support of LGBT makes us gay and unassigned genders are like fae and anything but straight is a phase. You ridicule us for passing through rainbows in life, yet at the same time saying we’re all different by color. You paint us with paints that you chose and yet you wanted orange, not rose.

Your job was to build the generation ahead, structure an environment and raise us, instead you mistyped somewhere in the code, and now our home is collapsing while we fuss. You say it was us while we hold up its walls and sing for new beginning. We wrap ourselves up and rebuild the walls, and we can leave you out of its halls.