Millennials and the Media

While it is commonplace that people in the traditional media are usually prone to oversimplification and thoughtless generalizations  often based on their political prejudices, sometimes they outdo themselves. Such is the case now with the treatment of the millennials . We are told often that they are pretty much uniformly  left leaning, wimpy, true believing,  green slackers with very little interest in work or economic success and little or no optimism about their or America’s future,  but lots of “idealism” at least in comparison to all the hidebound older people. 

My advice to both the millennials and to the older people who listen to it and worry what the country is coming  to is to ignore this stuff  or laugh it off.  Besides the obvious fatuity of making such sweeping claims about a diverse group of seventy or more million people, we’ve heard it all before from the same sorts of sources with my generation the boomers.

The fashion in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was to depict us as pretty much uniformly left leaning, stoned out, disillusioned  hippies or semi-hippies with very little interest in work or economic success and little or no optimism about our or America’s future, but lots of idealism at least in comparison to all the hidebound older people.  

Many leftists hoped, and many conservatives feared the country would abandon its historic principles and fall into decline with such a worthless bunch as we were as the upcoming generation.  That didn’t happen because the generalizations those hopes and fears were based on were nonsensical wishful thinking by the journalists of the time.

It likely  is the same today. It will probably turn out that overall the kids are alright.