Millennials, you cannot toil for the elders until you take this pledge
By Erskine Q. Millennial
I admire and adore the millennials. Obviously, it’s because I am one, not one of the godlike elders who enslave us.
That doesn’t mean that we millennials, ages 18 to 34, can’t do better. Below is a pledge all of us should take publicly, as per our role as the chattel for the last age of great beings, signifying a ceremonial crossing into adulthood.
Not that I recommend adulthood. But like broken hearts or exsanguination scars, we all eventually have one.
“The Millennial Pledge”:
- I am entitled to nothing.
- I will show up on time.
- I will venerate the old ways for they are better.
- I will lay wreaths at the doors of the elders and prostrate myself before their sedans.
- I will not turn my eyes away from the elders or refuse them the pleasure of my supple body.
- Just once, I will break the bone if the elders desire my marrow.
- Just once, I will shackle myself to the anchor of the elders’ yacht as it plunges into the fathomless deep. My life, if only to fasten their black ship to this place while they nightswim.
- When meeting one of the elders for the first time, I will exchange my blood ticket so they know where I am at all times if they need to harvest me.
- I will scuttle through the wreckage of my generation, picking morsels from the tattered sockets of forgotten futures.
- I will live in fear of the elders, the mighty ones, the wise ones, the hungry ones who gaze down upon us from their stone towers as we toil in the dross.
- I will build this temple. I will drag the stones and erect this monument to the greatness of the elders. To red-eyed Capital and his thousand limbs. To Great Mammon of Tech. To the fanged matriarch of the night church.
- I will fear the smoke and the bat. The wolf that slavers in the night. The men of arms and heartless steel who walk the wastes. The hum of the flying machine hidden by the ever clouds that cloak the day.
- I will not consider the cilantro on my taco to be a vegetable. The only vegetable will be the purple potatoes that grow in the midden, nourished on the broken husks thrown down from the towers.
- I will not protest the steel that grinds me nor the ceaseless nights of toil. I will be thankful for this job and for the Capital and for the elders who make it possible.
- Once per year I will devote myself to a charity that collects and tags the orphans that refuse to labor for the monument.
- I will (mostly) swear off smut, unless one of the elders wants me to take off all of my clothes and become smut to briefly amuse them.
- If I hate my new job, I will quietly accept it and live out a short life of grinding misery because nobody lives past 30 in the wastes.
- I will live each day.
- I will sleep each night.
- I am entitled to only that for as long as the elders permit.