To the Old Guard

Don't pity us, we will live to see the other side. I don't know what will come after this, but it won't be what came before, and that is a wonderful thing.

Don't apologize, you didn't know what you were up against. Nobody knew. How can you try and predict history? You thought that Reagan was going to be the worst you faced, which was a reasonable assumption at the time. Of course it's obvious in retrospect, and its easy for me to sit here and be angry at you for not predicting the future of global political sentiment, but it certainly wasn't obvious in the moment. For all I know, the worst is yet to come.

We are stronger than you were. We will fight harder than you did. I know they keep bringing out scary statistics, but really, it's just the men. If they don't grow out of this weird online conservativism, which many likely will, then we will just have to have a revolution without men, which honestly might be a good thing. I can't promise you that we will win, but I can promise we will hurt them more than you did.

I can't ask you not to despair, but I can ask you to trust us. We will do our best, for ourselves, for our children, and for you.

You are leaving behind a deeply broken world, but when has the world not been broken? And it is not a world devoid of strength. We'll be okay. You were okay, for the most part. There will never be a world with no punks, unless they kill every single one. And until that day comes we fight like hell.