On Millennials

I have a memory, from when I was a teen-age camp counselor (products of Centralia School District will remember Camp Cispus), of us High School Juniors being shocked--shocked!--by the filthy language and sexual preciousness of our 12-year-old charges.  "What happened to GI Joe and Barbie, you know, all the more innocent things we loved when we were 6th-graders?!" we said entirely un-ironically and un-selfconciously, "Kids these days!"

I laugh about that memory in part because there was only a 4-5 year difference between us and those 6th-graders; shoot, kids a full decade younger than me are within my "demographic" now. 

But the other reason I chuckle is because it's the uncontrollable impulse of every generation to declare, as un-ironically, immaturely and without a shred of self-awareness as a teen-ager: "Kids these days!"

I bring this impulse up because of the recent and wide-spread assaults on the ill-defined "Millenial Generation;" we are repeatedly informed by Time magazine, mass-market PhDs, hackneyed HuffPost articles, and various and sundry talking-heads, that we are the most "lazy, narcissistic, entitled generation" that ever was.  (They'd know, I guess.) These much-maligned kids are oft described as "socially awkward" and having "poor communication skills," what with their facebooks and the twitters and youtubes and get-off-my-lawns and etc.

These adults lambast "kids these days" as if they were mushrooms that just magically sprung to life out of nowhere, without parents or upbringing, as though no one raised them.  Parents, perhaps that accusing finger should be pointed the other way. The deep irony is that it's Baby Boomers and Gen Xers calling Millenials "narcissistic"--the Pot calling the Kettle indeed!  Maybe you guys should quit bankrupting Social Security before you get all judgey.

In fact, while we're on it, for all the flaws of "Millenials" (and no generation is without 'em), it certainly was not the "Millenials" who exploded the deficit, exploited the third world, got mired in foreign wars, polluted the earth, and crashed the economy.  Adjusted for inflation, minimum wage is lower, college tuition higher, and the general cost of living more outrageous, than anything our spoiled elders ever had to deal with.  It's kinda poor form to wipe out the jobs then get mad at your kids for being unemployed and living at home.  Methinks the Boomers doth protest too much.

I have a vested interest in sticking up for these "Millenials" because 1) being born after 1980, I'm generally lumped into this age-group; and 2) as a college instructor, I am teaching these "Millenials"--and let me tell you, for however much their creeping text-speak in their papers drives me nuts, "lazy" and "entitled" these kids are not.

And I'm not teaching students of privilege, no--I'm currently at a community college, with the working poor, with the masses.  These students are juggling jobs, bills, family responsibilities, and classwork.  On the whole, these kids are stressed, and what's more, they are trying: they are hard-working, social, thoughtful, perceptive, ambitious, articulate, amiable, and, like all human beings everywhere, just doing the best they can given their circumstances.

Now, also like all humans, they're far from perfect; yes, they all waste too much time on facebook; but don't pretend for a sec that if facebook had existed in the '60s, that Baby Boomers wouldn't have been all over that like a weed-smoke on a tie-die.  ("just saw Hendx play natl anthm while trippin madd balls on lds! #groovy #rocknrollwillneverdie #YOLO"  --With Jane Fonda and George Bush in Woodstock, New York).


Yes, yes, I've heard all the anecdotes (never hard statistics) of unemployed Ivy League graduates who turn down some $40K/year job because it doesn't match their entitled sense of expectation, but let's be clear: these are Ivy League graduates you're citing!  Of course rich kids are entitled, narcissistic, and lazy, when have they ever not been?  Will you please quit treating the privileged as representative of the rest of us.

Quite frankly, the Proletariat inside me suspects that this Millenial-bashing is yet another strategy by which the rich and powerful try to deflect attention from their own sins; they project themselves instead onto their youth and by extension all youth, including the impoverished and disenfranchised, as part of their continued project of villainizing the poor so as to justify their oppressions and exploitations.  For shame.

Cause here's the thing: back when I said "Kids these days!", I was a teen-ager, I was immature, but I grew out of it.  I find it distressing that the older generations, the ones who should know better, the ones who actually run the place, still have not.

It's not the rising generation that I fear.