Conversation between a Boomer and a Gen Z.
Dear Boomers,
I’m writing this because a lot of us are tired of pretending everything is fine.
We grew up hearing how great things used to be. How one income could buy a house, raise kids, and still have something left over. How you could graduate high school or trade school and walk into a solid job. How communities felt safe and people actually trusted each other.
We don’t have any of that.
Instead we got sky-high housing prices, wages that haven’t kept up for decades, and student debt that follows us for life even if we paid back the original amount. We watch jobs in trades and manufacturing get crushed by cheap foreign labor and illegal immigration while politicians from both parties act like it’s no big deal. We see the Social Security and Medicare systems, the ones you and your parents paid into, getting stretched thinner every year as more people who paid far less into them start drawing out.
We feel betrayed.
You had the strongest economy in history, affordable homes, stable families, and real opportunity. Then somewhere along the way the doors were thrown open, the factories were shipped overseas, and the rules got changed so the people at the top win no matter what. Now we’re told to “just work harder” in a system that’s rigged against us.
We’re not lazy. We’re not entitled. We’re exhausted from watching the ladder get pulled up after you climbed it.
We want to know: When did you realize it was going this bad? And why didn’t more of you fight harder to stop it?
Sincerely, A frustrated Gen Z
I read your letter. I hear your anger. You feel betrayed, and a lot of you have every right to feel that way. You’re right that it got bad. But let me tell you how it actually happened from our side.
We switched parties more than once trying to get smaller government. We voted for politicians who promised to cut spending, secure the border, and put Americans first. We showed up at the polls. We wrote letters. We trusted the system.
The politicians did what they wanted anyway.
We never voted for open borders. We never voted to ship our factories overseas. We never voted to raid the Social Security lockbox or take the country off the gold standard. Those decisions were made by the generation before us and the permanent ruling class in Washington. They broke the deal no matter which party we sent to power.
We built the interstate system, the power grid, the early internet backbone, the satellite networks, and much of the physical world you live in today. You enjoy the benefits of that infrastructure every single day. We handed it to you in far better shape than we received it.
The suffering you feel, the wage stagnation, the housing crisis, the debt, the broken trust, didn’t fully hit until your generation and the one after. We watched it coming, warned about it, and got called every name in the book for doing so.
We didn’t create this mess. We inherited part of it and then failed to stop it. That’s on us. But pretending we wanted this outcome or voted for it is simply not true. We still believe in hard work, self-reliance, and building something real. We hope you do too.
The country we grew up in had real problems, but it also had real opportunity. You deserve that same chance.