There seems to be an epidemic sweeping across the older folks of the United States that involve hating Millennials. Usually, we are accused of relativism, lack of manners, apathy, self-absorption, laziness and loss of morals. What follows is weeping and gnashing of teeth for the loss of patriotism and fear of what will happen to our precious country in the hands of millennials who are too busy taking selfies.
I’d be scared too.
But for some reason, I’m not.
Perhaps it is true that millennials do have a higher sense and care for how their face looks on the internet, as well as what those behind screens think about them; however, it’s not particularly new to the human race to care about what others think. We freak out about not having enough likes over a certain photo, but folks in the 1950’s were worrying about if their tableware was acceptable to the neighbors. That’s what humans do, we tend to care about how others perceive us.
As for apathy and laziness, perhaps we can see that in the lack of young voters. The equivalent of me complaining about how far the polling place in the 1950s would be…
Oh, wait. There isn’t one because I’d be in a kitchen, not voting.
All sass aside, while we do glorify the 1950s and the virtues it certainly had, we easily forget how ridden it was with racism, sexism and little care for minorities. Today, that is something we tend to care about. College kids still protest over matters that are important to them, because college kids have that sort of time and enjoy standing for causes. We can also look at movements happening today that wouldn’t happen in the past: going green, campaigns against rape, campaigns against the sex trade, campaigns against bullying, campaigns to solve world hunger, campaigns bringing up issues of race.
It can also be noted that in the past there was not too much focus on high incarceration rates and how to decrease recidivism. Have we even made a dent in solving this problem? No, but we are at least talking about it, and that’s a place to start.
And how can we quickly forget one of the biggest words of our generation? Consent.
That was not really something that all were required to care about in the past, but there has been heightened attention to it. Whether you are against premarital sex or not, it probably can still be agreed upon that coercion and rape is wrong. Even though not enough is done to help those who have been raped, they at least can come forth while in the past there was little to no platform to do such a thing.
Still think we’re depraved sex crazy animals set on destroying the family?
While extramarital sex is more accepted nowadays, the disapproval of adultery has increased in time. So maybe in some views, we have dropped a virtue but have at least picked one up along the way. But humans are fallen and each generation excels at something that past didn’t, and fails at something that our predecessors succeeded at.
Our lack of patriotism can also be attributed to our less nationalistic age. We live in a time where we have more knowledge of the government’s failings and successes (though the news likes telling us the failures more) and can freely call someone an idiot on the internet for not sharing our view. But we all secretly love our country.
Finally, one of the favorite terms applied by our elders toward millennials is “postmodernism”. Usually, the term’s connotation entails moral relativity and general anti-Christian beliefs. However, the use of such a word in order to blame a generation does not make complete sense. The moderns are what we refer to as the thinkers around the Enlightenment who believed that reason and logic can solve everything which surpasses the naivety of those who blindly follow some God up in the clouds. Postmodernism is merely something that developed in the 20th century that denies that grand theories are the answers or only answers to life. Those people who jumped on that boat witnessed in their time the abandonment of all reason, Germany, which was one of the heavyweights of the Enlightenment, led one of the most heinous genocides. If I had read the moderns and their views of the nature of man and how politics works and how history should work, I’d be pretty messed up too if I saw or lived close to the World Wars and Vietnam.
I will grant, there is a level of relativity that comes with postmodernism. But that does not necessarily mean that every millennial does not hold assumptions in their head that they believe to be intrinsically true. For instance, all humans have value. Or murder is wrong. Our generation does, however, need to learn that it is completely okay to absolutely disagree with someone, as long as we allow them to speak.
Millennials do fail in areas that the past did not, but we do care about consent, world hunger, issues of race, and caring for the environment in ways that our predecessors didn’t.
