Being the stubborn people we millennials are we all feel that we’re right about everything. We know more than the person sitting next to us in our lectures and of course we know more than the person next to us when it comes to politics. But, the terrifying truth is we really don’t!
The average millennial can tell you more about the Kanye West and Taylor Swift beef or Brangelina’s split than they can about the upcoming presidential election. The reality is that the election that chooses the person running our country is 42 days away and the average teenager couldn’t tell you any ambitions or facts from our two candidates.
Are the millennials to blame though? Is it our fault? Is there something we can fix? The answer to that is it’s not our fault but, we can fix this horrifying reality.
We’ve grown up in a world full of entertainment. When we were small our parents stuck us in front of a tv for entertainment. When we were in class and our 7th grade teacher was too tired to teach, she’d flip on some Bill Nye the Science Guy to entertain us. Now when we get home from days full of sucky retail jobs and exhausting lectures we don’t want to be further informed. We plop ourselves on a couch and click on E-News or Keeping Up with the Kardashians or Orange is the New Black.
We’re exhausted and our brains are searching for entertainment however the scary reality is that more of us will sit through the Kardashians than through a 30 minute news story. More of us sat around last night scrolling Instagram or watching Monday night football instead of tuning into the presidential debate. But the thing that concerns me the most is that while scrolling Instagram or Pinterest or Facebook you probably learned just as much as you would have had you tuned into the debate.
The problem with being in the millennial generation is that our politicians and our professors, the leaders and educators of this nation, are becoming entertainers! Our professors crack jokes and “teach” with Youtube to keep us entertained in class instead of educating and our presidential candidates stand infront of our nation and make digs at eachother while ignoring the actual problems in our nation.
If you ask just about any millennial you see about Trump’s plans for lowering taxes they wouldn’t know what to tell you. However that same person is walking around shouting “Make America Great Again.” And I don’t know any other country that would stand for a presidential candidate standing at a podium saying “He’s written a lot of books about business, they all seem to end at chapter 11.” (Hillary on Trumps business ethics).
When did we become a nation full of comedians? When did we start caring about the meme’s and jokes we can make from a speaker and not what the speaker, a future nation leader, could do for us? Unless we can start focusing on facts and not the jokes a speaker can make, one of these two candidates is going to win an election and we as a country are going to lose.
