Think for a minute about the connotation of the word “millennial." What do you picture? If you’re like most, probably something like this:
Over the past few years, the student protest has gone from an effective way to get an idea into the public eye to an effective way to tell people what’s bothering us this week. The first picture above? That’s from the University of Missouri last year, as students protested continuous racial mistreatment around campus. A serious issue, certainly, and one worth retaliating against. And the second picture? A group of students who were angry somebody wrote “Trump 2016” on the Emory University campus – in washable sidewalk chalk.
Student protests have a long track record of success in American social issues. Protests over the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s helped average citizens all over the country feel heard on their side of the issue, and protests in previous decades by African-American students had shed light on the serious need for change in this country. Hell, student protests concerning the Duke University Lacrosse scandal in 2006 all but decided the case before it even went to court – even though the students were eventually proven innocent. But that’s another story for another day.
You might ask why, then, is today’s protest-first culture such a bad thing? And the answer is simple: it’s overdone. These days, college students use protesting like a snobby rich kid uses his lawyer father, only instead of “My dad’ll sue you”, it’s “I’ll make a poster and get on the news." And eventually it becomes a ‘boy who cried wolf’ scenario, devaluing all future protests to the point that real, serious issues could be left by the wayside as a result. And it’s not okay.
I’m proud to be a student at a competitive American university, and the actions of other college students around the country make that pride fade. We aren’t taken seriously anymore. We’re a joke, we’re babies, we’re whiners. We’re immature children who can only get national media attention if it’s a protest adults can criticize or spring break footage they can reprimand us for. I long for the days that college students were the best of the best, fresh out of a world-class education but not yet tainted by the outside world, but I fear those days are behind us. Possibly for good.
To really clarify my point, my title is a bit overaggressive: I’m not telling every college student with a strong opinion on an important issue to take down their fliers, delete their Facebook event, and cancel their protest. But I do insist, please, that before you raid the greenspace and come up with clever chants, you ask yourself: is this issue worth it? Is a lack of ethnic diversity in the dining hall menu worth getting the school’s president fired? Is a disagreeable and unthreatening opinion written in chalk worth disrupting the days of thousands of people? Is blocking the highway and interrupting the path of emergency vehicles for an entire day the most effective way to convey my point? I guarantee most scenarios (all scenarios for the last question) will yield an emphatic “no”.
If you choose to read this piece and completely ignore its message, go ahead; it’s your right, after all. I’m just one person. But if you choose to do so, you have absolutely no right to question the public perception of the word “millennial”, because it’s your actions that have gotten us in this hole. The rest of us will be sitting back, waiting to claw us out of that hole and get our generation the respect and recognition it deserves.
