The American Inheritance
It’s hard to know where to begin. Every week brings new horrors, another violation, another reminder of how far gone we are. This week, the fascist administration is recycling the same old grievances and floating fresh accusations, all to distract from the Epstein files they once promised to expose and now refuse to release. Gaza is starving. ICE is tearing families apart. Armed contractors are roaming American streets in tactical gear, dressed for a war they seem eager to start. The cruelty never pauses. The noise never lets up. And we’re just expected to carry on.
I don’t have a tidy way to make sense of it. But I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Overloaded. Angry. Grieving. Trying not to give up. What follows isn’t a response to the headlines. It’s a reflection on what it’s meant to come of age through all of this, and what it means to still be here.
There’s been a through line in every post I’ve written, even when I didn’t mean for there to be. From the first essay about survival to the more playful or observational pieces, and most recently the one on institutional abuse, there’s a current running through all of them that I can’t shake. Maybe it’s just the reality of being a millennial in America. Or maybe it’s bigger than that. Either way, I keep coming back to the same truth: our entire adult lives have been shaped by collapse.
The generations before us stepped into adulthood during an era of possibility. The boomer generation came of age just as the country was emerging from wartime into record-breaking prosperity. Homeownership was not only within reach, it was a given. College was affordable. The idea of working hard and getting ahead wasn’t just a slogan, it was a lived experience for many of them. They got to buy in at the ground floor. And the systems they bought into rewarded them, again and again. They built wealth through real estate. They watched the stock market rise. They were handed the keys to a system that worked, at least for them.
And then they quietly pulled up the ladder behind them.
Millennials entered adulthood in the shadow of disaster. The towers fell when many of us were still finishing high school or just entering college, and everything changed. We were told that freedom had enemies, that our safety required surveillance, suspicion, submission. The War on Terror wasn’t just a slogan sold to us, it was the air we breathed for the next twenty years. We came of age as our country launched endless wars, killed civilians, tortured prisoners, and called it justice. While politicians spoke of sacrifice, defense contractors made billions. And when we asked questions, they told us we were unpatriotic.
Just as we were beginning to build lives of our own, the economy collapsed. The banks had gambled with our futures, bundling mortgages, selling off risk, inflating a housing market built on fraud. And when it all fell apart, they got bailed out. Consumers got blamed. They kept their bonuses. We watched people lose their jobs, families lose homes, and we watched the people who caused it walk away richer than ever. And the system didn’t change. The banks got even bigger, and the rules became looser. The message was clear: there would be no justice. Just fallout.
That was the world we stepped into. A world where fear was normalized, cruelty was justified, and power never paid a price. A world where collapse wasn’t a chapter, but the setting for our lives. The scaffolding was already gone. We were just trying not to get crushed by the debris.
Since then we’ve seen minimum wage stagnate for nearly two decades. Home prices have become absurd, interest rates even worse, and now the insurance system is teetering on the edge of collapse, making large swaths of the country uninsurable. Incomes don’t keep up. Rent is more than most mortgages used to be. And we’re told over and over again that this is somehow a reflection of our choices. That if we just worked harder, saved more, planned better, didn’t expect so much, maybe we’d be able to claw our way into the life that they inherited by default.
But this isn’t just about money or real estate or the “American Dream.” That’s a symptom, not the disease. The real sickness is the way this country has systematically stripped away any notion of shared human care. It’s the myth of fairness that has become a weapon, this idea that people should have to earn everything, even the basics. That if you can’t afford food, shelter, or healthcare, it’s your own fault. That suffering is proof of failure, and comfort must be deserved.
That’s not how humanity has ever truly worked. In the earliest villages, survival wasn’t individual. It was collective. Warriors, healers, teachers, farmers, spiritual leaders, artists. Some fought. Some cooked. Some told stories. Some raised children. Some made music to carry people through grief. Some cared for the dying. Not everyone contributed in the same way, and surely, some were cast out or misunderstood. That’s part of human history too. But the core idea remained: the village was meant to hold its people. Belonging wasn’t earned, it was assumed. We’ve forgotten that.
The structure we live in now works directly against that truth. It isolates us and punishes the vulnerable. It treats dignity as something that has to be earned. At some point, we started calling suffering a virtue and decided that offering too much help would make people dependent. We created imaginary rules about who deserves to live well and who doesn’t, and we pretend those rules are just common sense. But they aren’t. They were designed as political tools to protect power. And they are killing us.
What’s made it worse is that we grew up being told we’d inherit something better. We were shaped by public television that offered a vision of how to live among others. Not in a political sense, but in the way adults spoke to children, demonstrating care, patience, responsibility. Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow—they didn’t teach us how to get ahead. They taught us how to be kind. How to care for ourselves and each other. How to listen. How to belong. We believed those lessons, and we carried them into adulthood. And then we looked around and realized the adults who came before us had long since stopped believing in them.
They became cruel, bitter, and insecure. They absorbed the worst messages from talk radio and Fox News and Twitter, and began to see anyone in need as a threat. They blamed the poor. They blamed immigrants. They blamed their own kids. They mocked compassion as weakness. They decided that the problem wasn’t the system, it was the people trying to survive it.
But this system was broken from the start. You can trace its DNA straight through American history, from land theft to slavery to segregation to mass incarceration. After the Civil War, Reconstruction was a chance to build something real. To ensure that Black people had rights, land, representation, access. For a brief moment, it worked. But then came the backlash. White rage. Political cowardice. And just like that, Reconstruction was dismantled. Jim Crow took its place. Segregation was reasserted. And the same cycle began again—progress met with panic, justice met with sabotage.
Even in the 20th century, long after slavery had ended, white Christians were still fighting to preserve segregation. Christian colleges like Bob Jones University found ways to circumvent civil rights laws under the guise of “religious liberty.” And when that battle started to slip away, evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and his cohort pivoted. They looked for a new moral issue to rally around, and landed on abortion. Not because they cared about it, but because it could build political power. It was a strategic play to regain advantage and maintain control.
That strategy gave us the Moral Majority. It gave us Reagan. It laid the groundwork for today’s Republican Party: a coalition built on grievance, racism, and Christian nationalism. Over time, that movement cemented its power through the courts, through think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, through judges and presidents carefully chosen to preserve their agenda. They didn’t even try to hide it. They rigged the system in plain view. And when our generation finally gained a voice, when we voted for someone who reflected a different kind of future, they made it their mission to gut his presidency.
Mitch McConnell didn’t just block Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick. He blocked dozens of federal judgeships, leaving vacancies open for years. He used procedural tricks to grind legislation to a halt. He said outright that his goal was to make Obama a one-term president, not because of any specific policy disagreement, but because a Black man had been elected president. He didn’t need to say it out loud. The quiet part oozed from every maneuver. It wasn’t governance. It was sabotage, driven by the same white resentment that has always haunted this country.
The fact that one bitter man with a vendetta could stall the progress of an entire nation should disturb us all. It wasn’t just political gamesmanship. It was a failure of moral design. Our system allowed him to do it. That level of power, concentrated in so few hands, created the conditions for everything that followed. Citizens United had already cracked the foundation, opening the floodgates to dark money. Corporations and billionaires began to buy influence with impunity, funding campaigns, judges, think tanks, and media outlets. The right didn’t just win elections. They captured the machinery behind them. Democracy became theater. Legislation became leverage. Power became a product you could purchase.
And then came Trump. He didn’t have a vision for the courts because Trump doesn’t think strategically. He reacts, he performs, he does what benefits him in the moment. But he offered power in exchange for loyalty, and the right-wing machine gave him a list. One by one, he filled the vacancies McConnell had preserved, seating judges groomed by the Federalist Society, many with barely any experience but all with the same mission. We watched Roe fall. We watched voting rights erode. We watched climate policy die in committee.
When Democrats regained power in 2020, they had a chance to fix what had been broken. They had a chance to protect us. But they chose caution. They clung to outdated ideas of decorum and bipartisanship. They told us eliminating the filibuster would divide the country. That expanding the court was too extreme. That prosecuting a former president would set a dangerous precedent. We told them the danger was already here. We told them that if they didn’t act, we’d lose what little democracy we had left. They said it wasn’t that simple.
But it was. People need to be protected. And they weren’t.
People need to be cared for. And they’re not.
There’s something deeply wrong with how we’ve come to treat one another in this country. The refusal to repair, to acknowledge harm, to admit the role of history in where we are today. It’s a kind of moral rot. And that rot touches everything. We see it in how we handle homelessness. In how we talk about crime. In how we dismiss children killed in their classrooms as a reasonable cost of freedom. In how we fund war and genocide with our tax dollars, then look away, because we don’t have to see the bodies, and it doesn’t touch our daily lives.
And so we live in this impossible tension, raised to believe in something good, but watching it get torn apart in real time. Being told to fix it by the very people who broke it. Being told to wait our turn when we already know what needs to be done. And all the while, the fires burn hotter.
I don’t know what comes next. Maybe the collapse has to run its course before anything new can grow. Maybe the people clinging to power will never let go, and something bigger than us—climate, chaos, time—will finally force the shift. I don’t know how or when it ends. But I do know we are not broken because we care. Nor are we naïve for believing the world could be softer, fairer, more humane. We are not weak for demanding dignity, or tenderness, or justice that includes everyone.
We are what’s left of the village, and we must protect what’s possible. We must carry forward the vision we created for ourselves—the one that told us people matter, that care is a form of strength, that justice isn’t something to be begged for, it’s something to build. That vision is slipping. The rot is loud, and the cynicism is contagious. But if we don’t hold on, it won’t survive.
We won’t be handed power. We may never be invited in. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. What we believe about kindness, fairness, and each other’s worth still lives in us. It lives in how we show up, in how we refuse to give in to cruelty, even when it surrounds us.
That’s the fight now. To survive it without becoming it. To stay human. And to build the future we still believe in.