Aging might not come with a ton of perks, but there is one that humans have enjoyed since the dawn of time – doling out criticism to the generations that come after them.
Until the next generation of entitled slackers comes of age, the target du jour is millennials, the idealistic punching bag of baby boomers far and wide. In the last five years or so, partisan and nonpartisan news orgs alike published troves of articles and think pieces blaming millennials for the death of restaurant chains, sex and a slew of other things that are more connected to financial circumstances than morality.
It’s hard to ruin everything baby boomers created while still failing to attain the American dream, but as a millennial, I can say we are up for the job. We have more student and medical debt than our parents, we’re more likely to work in the gig economy than to have a job with something called a “pension,” and if we hear another tired joke about avocado toast, we can’t be held responsible for our actions.
If you add politics into the mix, millennials’ perceived misdeeds grow more dire. In an opinion piece that ran in Fox News last week, Generation Xer Carol Roth wrote that millennials are fools to think the United States isn’t experiencing some incredible prosperity streak. All we supposedly want is instant gratification and socialism.
Roth warned dramatically: “So, if you know a millennial who doesn’t believe they are prosperous, stage an intervention now and explain the difference between gratification and instant gratification — before their ignorance becomes a catalyst to destroy the economic foundation of this country.”
Roth’s piece is littered with factual errors, like the complete inaccuracy that Americans’ average life expectancy has increased when the exact opposite is true. But she parrots a lot of criticisms that baby boomers have used for the last decade to dismiss millennials’ legitimate concerns about growing economic inequality.
Roth and others paint a rosy picture of the United States, where Americans are earning more than ever and are healthier than ever, even if neither of those things is true. In this version of what it’s like to live in the United States, millennials (and everyone else) living at or below the poverty line won’t work or whine too much or spent too much on fucking avocado toast to be able to save up to buy a house or a car or not be in staggering debt from medical expenses and student loans.
Roth and others refuse to consider that millennials face a number of financial and political pressures that are a lot different than what previous generations had to deal with during their 20s and early 30s.
All generations have flash points, scandals, conflicts and tragedies like war, which are admittedly impossible and pointless to compare in terms of the toll they take. However, millennials reached adulthood at a point when a number of factors had been brewing for a long time. We’re in a services-based economy that devalues labor, keeps wages low and doesn’t offer much chance for advancement.
In her viral BuzzFeed piece from early this year, Anne Helen Peterson adroitly laid out the unique financial position that millennials find themselves in and how it leads to burnout.
“The ‘greatest generation’ had the Depression and the GI Bill,” Peterson wrote. “Boomers had the golden age of capitalism; Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics. And millennials? We’ve got venture capital, but we’ve also got the 2008 financial crisis, the decline of the middle class and the rise of the 1%, and the steady decay of unions and stable, full-time employment.”
Michael Hobbes delved into these financial shifts in a beautifully designed longform piece for Huffington Post’s Highline that remains depressingly relevant despite its 2017 publishing date.
“Mention ‘millennial’ to anyone over 40 and the word ‘entitlement’ will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo,” Hobbes wrote. “… Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.”
Speaking of being screwed, aside from our financial pressures, millennials will inherit two problems from baby boomers that are staggering and staggeringly political – political polarization itself and climate change.
Baby boomers, by virtue of their actions, have made it clear that they have no intention of addressing climate change. By the time it’s our turn to be in charge, what tools will we have to do something about it? This collides into my most intractable fear: Will there be anything we can do at that point?
And the other thing – political polarization. Baby boomers and individuals like Newt Gingrich, who was born into the Silent Generation, are chiefly responsible for our current tribal approach to politics, a system that values things like shouting and refusing to compromise. With the addition of widespread propaganda and misinformation, I believe what we’re seeing now is fundamentally different from the cultural conflict of the Vietnam or McCarthyism eras, often cited as the worst cultural conflicts in American history.
Outlandish and tyrannical statements from those in power – like a congressman quoting “Mein Kampf” to own the libs or the idea that we need to “get rid of judges” – point an arrow toward a future I’m more than wary of. If anything, what we’re seeing hearkens to the backlash against the civil rights movement and the fear that made Americans sign onto the Japanese internment during World War II.
So, to Roth and others who think millennials just don’t get how good we have it: We aren’t delicate snowflakes. We’ve carried the weight of other people’s mistakes since the Great Recession. Now we’re seeking stability as best we can while baby boomers are setting the stage for – what exactly?
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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