In defense of young people
The term “Millennial” has become a catchall for “Anyone younger than me who I don’t like.”
Damn millennials ruin everything. Can’t buy a stick-shift transmission anymore. Haven’t heard a decent guitar solo in a popular song this century. Shit, the 1986 pop hit “Mad About You” by Go-Go’s singer Belinda Carlisle has a better guitar solo than most of the stuff you hear on the radio today. My back hurts.
You can’t trust a generation that puts avocados on toast.
Young people. They think they know everything. They are hot tempered. They give way to their anger. They’re indignant. They lack self-control.
That previous paragraph? Aristotle, 2,400 years ago. We did not invent criticizing younger generations. Laugh all you want about them smoking Tide Pods in their black-market vape machines, the reality is: they’re better than us. I’m not sure how old you are, dear reader, but young people are mostly an improvement upon older generations.
I admire young people.
Well, not the ones carrying tiki torches into Charlottesville. Or those who set their Nikes on fire because the company supported a football player who kneeled. And also not the guys writing grammatically atrocious screeds on social media using words like “libtard” and “cuck.” They can all inhale a big bag of Taco Bell farts. Tell Jordan Peterson I said “hi.” And by “hi” I mean “fuck you.”
Every generation has its share of shitheads and saints, but the needle moves.
After completing more than fifty solar orbits, I’ve learned plenty from mentors who were older, more seasoned, more experienced. And it’s been beneficial, but it’s time to expand horizons. To keep learning what it means to be a better human, we should look to the whippersnappers on our lawns.
The reason I admire those who prefer Snapchat to Facebook is that I remember what things were like when I was young. I went to high school in the 1980s with 1,800 other students, and do you know how many gay kids I knew? Zero. It doesn’t mean they weren’t there. It means they only told their closest friends because so many of us were horribly homophobic.
Content warning for this next paragraph. I’m about to repeat some hateful shit I witnessed while growing up.
In the 1980s, plenty of people saw AIDS as punishment for being gay. There were “jokes” that the acronym stood for “Anally Injected Death Sentence” and “Adios, Ignorant Dick Sucker.” I remember a guy with a hat that was a play on the old insecticide ad campaign of “Raid: Kills Bugs Dead.” But this hat said, “AIDS: Kills Fags Dead.” He wore it around my high school, and many people laughed, and he wasn’t told to remove it by either students or the administration. People who stood up to such bigotry often became an additional target.
During this era, governmental policies toward the AIDS epidemic could be summed up as “Let them die.”
Things changed. The needle moved.
My children are adults now, but when they were younger, we had the house that other kids hung out at, partially due to us having an awesome swing set, but also because I’m the kind of person who, the moment you walk in my front door, I shove food in your face. Anyway, I have witnessed that younger generations are more inclusive, more understanding, and more compassionate toward their fellow humans than those of my generation ever were. We have a more open society, at least in some parts of the world, where there is less fear in revealing one’s gender identity, sexuality, or even lack of religious belief.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. popularized this quote by 19th century Unitarian minister and slavery abolitionist Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Right now, that may seem like bullshit, because justice is uneven. It is uneven because it’s not the universe doing the work; the universe doesn’t give a shit about us. The moral arc is solely under human control, which makes improvements in our collective well-being far from inevitable.
But there have been advances. I spoke of the awful treatment of gay people in the 80s, but twenty years previous the situation was far worse. The hostility was such that they had to keep their love secret or be fired from their jobs, arrested by police, beaten, or even killed. Our attitudes changed because people made us see a different version of right vs. wrong. There is still a way to go, but in 2005, gay marriage was legalized in Canada, and the U.S. followed suit a decade later. And yet transgender people, of which there are approximately two million in the United States alone, continue to be marginalized, referred to as mentally ill, told they don’t exist, and are heavily discriminated against both socially and legally.
And while the work of Dr. King did much to advance civil rights for Black people in the United States, forcing the government to do their jobs by actually upholding the laws of the land, in more recent decades there have been significant steps backward in a country built on the myth of white supremacy. Schools are more segregated now than they were forty years ago, the gap in wealth between Black and white has risen dramatically, and infant mortality remains much higher for Black people. Add to this a woman’s right to bodily autonomy being systematically eliminated, and a startling rise in anti-Semitism across the political spectrum, and it paints a worrisome picture for where our society is headed.
The needle can move either way, forward or back. The moral arc bends toward justice only if weare committed to bending it.
So fucking bend it.