You Did Not Fail. You WERE Failed.
I am going to post this here, too, because I think there’s a few folks here who could stand to see it, too:
This is going out to several people I know and love, who really need to hear this right now.
This world we have right now is broken. YOU did not break it. You INHERITED a broken world. A world broken by the greed of the generations that came before you. Generations that seem to literally be unable to comprehend that they were the ones who broke this world. Who seem to be unable to comprehend that they stole the very things from you that allowed THEM to get to where they are with such ease and comfort. That stole from you the ability to EVER get to where they are now, without significant social change.
There is not a single place, not a single STATE, NOT A SINGLE SIGNIFICANT URBAN CENTER in the entire United States where one minimum wage job can pay for a one bedroom apartment. Not. One. Two minimum wage jobs could not support a couple in a one bedroom apartment, and still pay for food, health insurance, renter’s insurance, transportation, and utilities, much less handle ANY type of emergency or savings. NOT. ONE. PLACE.
You are not failures. You are not broken cogs in a functioning machine. You are not things that need replacing.
It is the machine that is broken.
It is the machine that needs replacing.
The arbitrary metric of “success” of your parents’ generation is no longer valid when these days, all you want is to be able to simply *survive*. And when simple SURVIVAL has become a metric of “success”? That should be all the evidence necessary to demonstrate that, yes, the machine is broken.
Life hurts. Life hurting is NOT YOUR FAULT. That’s not some “shift the blame” bullshit. That’s the fact that there are literally dozens, hundreds, thousands of people out there in the world with the money, influence, and power to CHANGE THE WORLD, who, every day, make the conscious choice to NOT TO. Life hurts. But you are not a failure because you are caught in the tides of THEIR greed.
Keep fighting. Keep trying. We can’t change anything unless we *all* keep fighting together. I know it hurts. Trust me, I DO know. But we are all in this TOGETHER. You don’t have to do this alone. Just reach out. Not everyone is going to be able to reach back. I understand that. But reach out anyway. Because one of us out here WILL be able to. Reach out. Yell. Scream. Whisper. SOMETHING. Just don’t lie down. Keep fighting upstream. Even if it’s by doing nothing more than getting out of bed each day.
Just keep trying. Never give up.
You are not a failure. YOU did not fail. You WERE failed.
You are loved.
And you are NOT alone.
Nightwing went through a pretty self-destructive phase after he allowed his arch enemy Blockbuster to be killed. He watched as the crime lord of Bludhaven got shot. So Dick does what he is unfortunately really good at: feeling sorry for himself and tells himself that he has failed Batman.
But after Dick almost got himself killed by overworking himself for six months, Batman drags him back to the Batcave so Alfred can look after his wounds. When Dick is awake, he expects Bruce to give him a lecture about his failure as a hero for not saving Blockbuster.
Well, Bruce IS pissed. But not because of that.
He is pissed at Dick for not taking care of himself and almost getting killed.
Batman is kind of a tough-love parent, but in a good way. He knows that Dick is blaming himself for Blockbuster’s fate, but he also won’t let Dick ruin himself because of it. He knows that Dick doesn’t need him to forgive him, Dick needs to forgive HIMSELF and move on from his mistake. Batman knows that Dick is a good man, too good to allow himself to drown in selfpity. And Dick shouldn’t expect Bruce to excuse him.
Also, I think it is lovely that Batman will forgive Dick for the Blockbuster affair, but he will UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES forgive anyone for hurting his “son”, not even Dick. Batdad FTW.
