A Poem for Generation Me

A poem for Generation Me who seem to think Earth was created in 2017
A poem for peeps who forget what our tupuna achieved
Forgetting what we, the people, sacrificed to topple tyrant French and English kings
And install elected regimes and MMP
So what a government was formed by the Nats? You’re lucky you got Democracy. Quit whining.

Yes the old folks left some Catholic guilt
but shot to the colonists for the shelters they built
and thanks to the tangata for growing kumara crops across the whenua
When 800 years ago, they arrived to find zero
fresh off the boat from Hawaiiki, Rapa Nui, each Matariki planting seedlings in soil frozen hard as stone with only feather cloaks for clothes
And today you give McDonalds Kamo
a Yelp review of Zero cause there was a queue? Cause your fast food wasn’t fast enough for you?

Shit, the first peeps had to drag gourds and yams through storms a thousand kays across the Pacific
And you bitch cause your quarter pack lacks a drumstick?

Pssht. We need to get humble and mumble
thanks up the family tree to peeps who bequeathed
A world that’s actually pretty sweet.
Giordano Bruno had his mouth and tongue nailed shut got staked and burned cause he stood up against the church
so we could learn we’re not the centre of the universe.
People died of radiation burns

so they could show you new elements (nod to the Curies, my Polish peeps)
And you blog and sob and weep cause you got no likes on your narcissistic vlog last week?
Shot to the Scottish botanist Alexander Fleming – you owe him for your sick kids’ bloomin’ penicillin.

Shout out to Sidney Farber. His unpaid, thankless work in a cold Boston hospital basement leukemia research farther.
Or the polio breakthrough of Jonas Salk. Without him you wouldn’t walk.
Props to my antecedents in Silesian swamps who propagated plots of potatoes and hops so I could have a beer to wash down my Polish vodka shots

We owe it all to Neanderthals who stepped aside and gave Homo sapes the stage to take their place as the greatest apes
And Charles Darwin was watchin, he staked his reputation to conclude this was evolution, in a book none of us even read, we
just type TL;DR ; read Buzzfeed listicle instead.

You wanna bitch about sugar in the gluten-free cuisine you put behind your privileged lips bro?
Long ago the only diet used to be Paleo, yo
Back in the day before flour, delivering a pizza would take a lot longer than half an hour, and there wouldn’t be any flavour except meatlovers,
and without peeps in the Middle East domesticating wheat and yeast your pizza wouldn’t even have a base, motherfucker

We need to take a step back and extend congrats to the scientists, the radicals, the Renaissance, the heretics, the artists, and recognise their sacrifices.
Beethoven went deaf and still composed Ode To Joy.
Gandhi got India independence sitting hungry in his lungi

Jesus Christ took a spear in the side so he could inspire Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, and
you want a thumbs up emoji cause you shared an activist meme you stole off Upworthy?
Actually, praise is deserved by Gutenberg, who gave us the the printing press to impress these words. How bout we worship the Sanskrit for the English alphabet, and the Hindu-Arabic for our numeral system. Why not thank your father for squirting you up your mother, and thank her ovaries for choosing you, the one sperm chosen from a million other.

So, Generation Flake-of-Snow, next time you wanna whinge about Game of Thrones or sports streaming speeds or how there oughta be trigger warnings in everything you read, shut up, don’t whinge, don’t weep, don’t Tweet,
cause on the Endeavour, on the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, on the Mayflower, on an outrigger
from Hawaiiki you wouldn’t last one week-y.