Bringing Mae Flowers

For the last 25 years, we have experienced non-stop “historical events”.

We had short period of hope from 2010 – 2015, when it looked like things might get better. The economy finally appeared to be recovering, and the LGBTQ community finally got the rights they deserved, but the election of 2016 brought that crashing down. And we all know that 2020 on has been a never-ending nightmare. But this has all happened before.

Millennials have a lot in common with the Greatest Generation.

I don’t mean to say that we deserve the title of “great”. But I do see similarities between the challenges Millennials and our great-grandparents experienced. The oldest among them lived through Spanish Influenza, WWI, The Dust Bowl and The Great Depression, and WWII. We lived though 9/11, The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession, COVID 19. But the similarities don’t end there. Ironically, we are fighting the same war against the inequality and Fascism.

We listened to their stories, and we use them to write our own.

Many young-people are using recipes their great-grandmothers used during the Great Depression and Rationing. More workers are joining unions like their great-grandfathers. Protesters are adopting and adapting practices their grandparents used during the Civil Rights movement. And we learn just as much from our ancestors’ mistakes as we do from their triumphs.

We’ve fought these battles before.

We’ve fought against income inequality before, and we won reform. We’ve fought against racism and fascism before, and we won Civil Rights. It was never perfect; both inequality and racism continued to exist. But when coal miners, and railroad workers, soldiers, and women stood together and demanded change– change happened. When we united across race, religion, gender, and political affiliation, we made the country better.

We are living through history every day.

History isn’t just something that happens to us, it happens because of us. The choices we make will shape the story we tell our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And their choices shaped the stories they told us. I remember many events that will be added to history books– some already have been. But it’s the stories we tell to our posterity that will leave the biggest impact on the generations to come.