Sib Law's poetry, photography, and other musings

To our graduating class,

What a life you will lead! Your whole lives are ahead of you and you will face adversity at every major transition in your life. Some of the adversity will be your own doing, after all, you’re human. Most of the adversity will be completely out of your control.

People will call you generation X. As a product of the roaring eighties, you will go to a college or university in droves and understand the world around you better than many generations before you. This is in spite having grown up with Saturday morning cartoons, UHF television, and MTV.

When you get out of college, there will be a recession. There won’t be any jobs for you. See if you can get into graduate school. Whatever you do, don’t plan on starting a career type job for a few years. Don’t worry, you’re strong. You have grit. And, this will build character.

Shortly after you finally get a career started, at the end of the 1990s the dot-com industry will implode. They will call it the dot-bomb! You might keep your job, but don’t expect any raises for a while.

Then, as the housing market hits a peak, you’ll finally be able to get into a house. Not because you’ve saved money (that will be impossible); lenders won’t require any money down and they won’t check your credit. You’ll already have kids when you move into that first house and it will feel like a late start. Even so, this brief period will make you believe you might finally get ahead. Don’t hold onto that feeling too long.

Just as you begin to recover and start to save for your kids college fund The Great Recession will hit. It will be worse than any recession since The Great Depression. It will be caused by all the loans made with bad credit and no money down. A lot of you will lose your house and your job. You’ll be okay. You’ve got grit and this will build character, too.

Finally, when you think you will empty-nest and get to know the person you’ve been sleeping next to for the past twenty years, there will be a pandemic. The pandemic will be out of control because governments around the world were poorly prepared and didn’t heed the warnings. This will anger you because you will have watched many documentaries about coming pandemics for years on an invention they will call Streaming.

Your kids will go to college from your house. They won’t be allowed to hang with friends and neither will you. But, you will have been telecommuting for years. You will show them how it’s done. You will be the ones to solve problems.

You’ve got moxie! Having faced adversity during every major transition in life you will be the badass saviors of the world. You will be the fifty-something nurses and doctors, truck drivers and retailers, pastors and therapists, neighbors and friends who actually know how to hold their shit together when the world around you falls apart.

In your younger years some will call you Generation X. Fuck them! You’re Generation moXie! Show the world how it’s done!

Copyright © by Sib Law, 2020