Thread by @_danilo

I appreciate where this thread is coming from, but speaking as someone who has worked with youth and met hundreds of gen Z in the last few years

It IS a fundamentally different generation. In ways I have found staggering, if largely encouraging

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by @AnaMardoll view original on Twitter

First, consider temporal context

Gen Z is the first generation of universal digital natives. Even kids growing up in the hood almost all have cell phones (and I worked with underserved youth, I saw this with my own eyes)

Not just digital natives, either. Social software natives

Moreover, Gen Z is entering a world of unprecedented wealth inequality. They are approaching adulthood at a time where all the roadmaps they came up following have been shredded.

College is no guarantee of anything. Workforce participation has contracted by 4m since 2008

Gen Z also finds itself on the doorstep of catastrophic climate change, with almost no concerted plan to stop it. The US just pulled out of the Paris accords.

In every way, Gen Z has grown up in and inherited a world on fire

Meanwhile, Gen Z is the queerest generation ever. The levels of gender fluidity and non-normative sexuality are without precedent. Parents tell me that identity is itself fluid, with kids changing their names regularly

Gen Z’s fundamental identity framework is just different

So we’ve got a generation which finds itself inheriting a world that is simply hostile to its basic needs and norms.

A world sliding toward ecological disaster. A world with limited economic opportunity

It’s also a world where they travel instantaneously, over the wire, as a matter of course, to form communities as needed.

Where kids socialize over video chat

Gen Z is at home online in a way no other group is. Not even my generation, which came of age on the internet

All this to say:

-they have nothing to lose by breaking ranks

-their forebears have failed them dramatically

-they are better networked and more effective digital communicators than any other generation

-if they don’t act, they are guaranteed to slide into the abyss

It may be so that child protesters have existed in previous ages

But I can tell you, as the generation Iraq war teenagers: my generation did not have nearly the appetite for civil disobedience Gen Z does

And I’ve been saying that long before Parkland. cf BLM

In terms of incentives, there is no group of people more aligned to burn shit down than Gen Z. And perhaps none more capable, besides

The coalition of Millennials and Gen Z is my only hope to build an engine of lasting change.

Everyone else stays fucking up. That’s just facts

Protip: Don't do this #notall[generation] stuff

This is super simple: If Gen X and friends were going to save these kids, they woulda done it already.

No one is coming to save Gen Z. They sink or swim on their own.

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by @MissBilious view original on Twitter

That's what Parkland is all about. This is a generation of kids waking up to the fact that they're on their own. The grownups have nothing for them. If they want peace and prosperity, the only ones they can look to are themselves

The United States is a shithole. Massive inequality. Punishingly expensive healthcare. Extraordinary structural racism. Pathetic education completely divorced from any outcome besides standardized testing. Guns everywhere.

All this happened on previous generations' watch

You've got people who don't even have WATER

In the wealthiest country in the world, entire communities without safe or affordable water. And not just in Flint and Detroit. The rich have robbed California of its water. Whole Central Valley towns going without indoor plumbing

This situation did not come from nowhere. This situation was created, abetted, allowed by the people who came before Gen Z. It's not unreasonable for them (or anyone) to be skeptical that these same people can be trusted to put things right.

Or even to try, at this point.