To be honest, I didn’t even know my generation had a name until we became the scapegoat for all of society’s problems. If you were ever jealous that the Baby Boomers got their own fancy title, don’t you worry. If your birth year happens to fall between 1980 and 2000, you, too, belong to a generational group that has been named just so it would be easier for the rest of the world to blame us for things.
While the majority of the Millennials, or at least those of us that are constantly being criticized, are unified by values of social equality, just about everyone else seems to be pretty appalled.
We’ve been called the “cry baby” generation, accused of being “self-absorbed” and “over politically correct.” We’re the first generation to, as a majority, consistently defend homosexuals, widely accept the concept of racial inequality, and promote sex positivity. This isn’t to generalize; of course there are plenty of 20-somethings who have rebelled, or rather, failed to rebel, claiming their generation too “thin-skinned” and “overly-sensitive.”
We’re not perfect – but if we’re talking about progression, we’ve got every other generation beat.
This begs the question: Are the people criticizing Millennials implying that they’re proud of not being politically correct, compassionate, and discontent with injustice? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen something along these lines on Facebook: “The world is way too politically correct, no matter what you say, people will be offended. Like this post if you refuse to censor yourself.”
Actually, it’s really not that difficult to not be a jerk – but it requires unlearning all of the BS that was taught to you by the generation before you, and the generation before that, and so on. Why you wouldn’t want to change behavior that hurts others is beyond me – why you’d actually be proud of it is even harder to believe.
Considering that many of the people making these accusations are also the ones who claim there is a “War on Christmas” (see: 2015 Starbucks cup fiasco), I don’t know if we’re really the ones being overly sensitive here. We’re just being sensitive towards the wrong people. It's the Millennials who have made concepts like racial privilege, cultural appropriation, and sexual self-agency mainstream; of course these ideas existed before, but they were never so widely recognized by the majority of a generation.
Maybe we're getting offended by the wrong things. Maybe if, instead, we were speaking out against cleavage and immigrants and Caitlyn Jenner, we wouldn't be receiving such backlash. Or maybe we were always destined to be "that generation."
I feel like there’s nothing wrong with making the world a safer, more comfortable place for everyone – but I’m probably just as bad as the rest of my generation. What the world has envisioned is a gross over-exaggeration, much like the fabled feminist who yells at men for opening doors for them: a phenomena no one has actually encountered, but one that never fails to be cited in any women’s rights argument.
When people bitterly think about “the Millennials,” they imagine over-the-top (probably satirical) Tumblr posts and extreme examples like what went down at Yale a couple weeks ago. People only listen to these stories because life is just easier when you have a group to blame for the things you don’t like about the world.
What Millennials really are is living proof that there’s nothing more offensive than not being offensive. If you ask me, this says a lot more about everyone else than it does us.
