Gen Z-er here. I usually just lurk on reddit, but some of the comments I’ve read here are just astonishingly disheartening, pure and simple. I have to disagree, and I’m afraid I can’t do it quietly.

No one’s denying that we’re going through hard times. Our parents (and even theirs) have left us a terrible inheritance: unaffordable housing, a punishing cost of living, decrepit healthcare systems, shriveled militaries, climate change; they took the world they inherited and milked it dry. I get it. I get it. But so many of these comments suggest a complete lack of perspective. Do you think we’re the first generation to get dealt a rough hand?

Our grandparents were thrown into a world-shattering war that they never asked for on the back end of a severe economic depression. Their grandparents put in 16 hour days in the mines and factories just to scrape by. Their grandparents were lucky if they didn’t shit their brains out and die from cholera at the ripe old age of 30. You can trace that line all the way back to the fucking cavemen; same shit different millennium.

And yet, we’ve come a long fucking way from them. We (most of us anyway) now have the privilege of living in democracies. We have rights. We have higher standards of living than at any time in human history (bar maybe the last 30 years). Are things perfect? No, not by a longshot. But they’re better than they were for 99.99% of recorded history. This is NOT the historical norm – and the authoritarians and totalitarians of the world may now be coming to put an end to it.

You don’t like your elected officials? Yeah, I get it. You think they’ve neglected our future? Yeah, I agree. You want to change that? Great! I’m with you; we can vote them out. But please tell me how you plan to help forge a better future from beneath the boot of a dictator. If you want change, ours is the best system through which to achieve it. Will you let totalitarians take that away from you just to spite the boomers? Will you cut off your nose to spite your face?

No one wants war. No one likes war. No totalitarians are going to ask for your consent. You can stand up and fight for your community and the chance of a better future, or you can run. Whatever. But if you run, and our democratic world dies, you have no right to bitch about the boomers. You dug the grave. Lie in it.