Millennials. We are an interesting group of kids, for sure. And everyone has an opinion on us. We are either innovative or the perfect representation of the degradation in modern society, mostly the latter according to quite a lot of people. So when I met Barry and listened to him talk about his fascination with us and the hope for the future that we gave him, I was moved and inspired.
It was late afternoon on a chilly November day when I met Barry. My flight from Anchorage had just landed in Seattle roughly 20 minutes before, and I was exhausted from the long day of travel. I was looking forward to the steadily silent shuttle ride back to school, a time when I could prepare myself for my arrival at my dorm and the reality of the workload I would be returning to.
Barry was my shuttle driver, the best shuttle driver I’ve ever had. He was a big, black, jolly-looking man in his sixties with a disposition that made you immediately comfortable around him. I distinctly remember our first interaction—he laughed at me (who was anxiously preoccupied with watching the kiosk, waiting for my driver to emerge and take me back to school) and said something along the lines of “Oh I can tell you are on my shuttle! You keep starin’ at me!” I’d never had a shuttle driver so outgoing before, nor so forward. Despite the feelings of embarrassment that inevitably flooded me at being called out so directly, I decided I rather liked Barry. He was a friendly sort of man, and I appreciated his bluntness.
He was so curious about us, the people in his shuttle. Every minute during the trip, he was fully engaged in conversation with at least one person. I was not one of these people talking with him—not at first—I just listened. I listened as he talked about politics, and comedy show hosts, and career goals with the other students riding next to me. I listened as he blew kids’ minds with simple questioning and elevated their ways of thinking. I listened as he related his own opinions and allowed the kids to question him. I just listened, and I watched the lights of the cars on the freeway flash by outside the window.
One by one, the other people on the shuttle were dropped off. After a large group of University of Puget Sound students departed with their luggage, I realized I was the last person on the shuttle (except Barry of course). It was my turn to talk, my turn to be questioned and to question in return. I told him my majors—Classics and English—and he told me he looked forward to hearing me talk about Latin on TV one day. I told him I was a nerd, and he said not to worry, I would learn to dance and meet people eventually.
Then he began to talk. He talked about rap music. It was spoken music, poetry with a rhythm and a beat like no other. It could be used to move thousands. He talked about political movements. Black Lives Matter blew his mind. He was so amazed that so many kinds of people and people of different races could and would come together to help the belittled minority. And finally he talked about millennials. Millennials, to Barry, created these things. They merged these things together. They used them to move society forward, to change the world. More than that, they did it all as one group, one collective powerful whole. They were the bright star leading the world to a new and better place in the future.
I’d never met someone who had so much faith in my generation before. It was scary knowing that someone could trust us this much. The weight of Barry’s hope was overwhelming. But it was also uplifting. I was able to see what Barry saw and the truth in the words he spoke. It made me want to work harder than ever to fit this image of a millennial that Barry showed me. And it reminded me of what others in my generation are and where we could take the world. I know it’s cheesy, but we can do amazing things. When I met Barry, that’s what I learned. Let’s make his faith in us worth it.
