Radio Free North Hollywood

If you’re in your thirties and forties, I’m talking to you. If you remember wanting an Atari, I’m talking to you.

I know how it is. We’re getting old. And everything we hoped for never really happened. The future got here only in the stupidest and worst ways. There’s no flying cars or end to war, just unemployment and killer robots and dead oceans, and this magic internet that we never dreamed of that lets us talk about it all.

Instead of the new tomorrow we were promised, we got a bad rerun of our parents’ yesterday. America’s been stuck in neutral for our entire lives, while the engine just runs and runs and runs.

There’s been a pall of doom over our entire lives. First it was the good old global thermonuclear war of our childhood days, then that went away and now…we don’t even know what it is, but we know we’re in terrible, terrible trouble. We can’t even tell where the trouble is coming from. It seems like it’s coming from everywhere.

It’s been hard to not give up.

But…

What if this is it?

What if you waited your entire life for this, and when it finally came you were just…too…old. Too old and tired and worn down and passed by. What if it finally happens, and we’re just too old to recognize it?

If you wait your whole life for something, and when it finally gets here you’re just too old to do anything about it, didn’t you wait your life for nothing?

But if you grasp that moment, then it can still all turn to gold. Those years do not have to be wasted — the world waited, and you waited, and the world was ready, and you were there.

Oh Class of ’93, you weren’t meant to spend your life in grey fluorescent hell. You weren’t meant for it all to be for nothing. We were raised by good people who wanted to give us a world full of light and joy and friendship, energy and possibility and freedom, respect and truth and dignity. An end to war, and an end to hate, to hunger, to sickness. They did not prepare us for this mean little world.

This is what they trained us for. This is what they made us for. This is why we have dragged ourselves through an endless grey night, and the dawn is finally here. The world is finally ready. The time is finally come — we can take our future back.

But we’re so old!

It doesn’t matter. Life isn’t fair. Some people wait their whole lifetime and it never happens, For us, it’s finally here. It was almost too late — it definitely wasn’t too early. But you know what they say about something that wasn’t too late and wasn’t too early; it’s right on time.

It’s time for us to help our parents keep the promise they made to us, the promise their parents couldn’t keep to them.

You are not going to get another chance.

Wake up!