Ok Boomer
I don't understand generational conflict. There is a movement on Twitter currently (and, yes, I understand that Twitter is not necessarily the best place to get reasoned, representative information) that millennials are now exempt from being given "crap ever again" because of all that we've "been through" as a generation.
"We as Millennials may come off as soft and entitled, but no modern generation has seen as many terrorism attacks, wars, plagues, poverty, cybercrimes, or anything like that like we have. We’re caught in the middle all the time," professes one Twitterer, among a chorus of similar screeds. This is a very stupid argument. I don't want to be a traitor to my generation but I certainly hope that this millennial, whose Twitter name is the erudite "sm0ke_blunt," doesn't speak for all of us as nearly everything he proclaims in his infantile announcement is wrong. You are much less likely to die in a war right now than an any other time in history. By a country mile. You are also stunningly less likely to be poor, no matter where you are born. Terror attacks? In 1984, the year I was born, there were 27 airline hijackings. You have to add the total of hijackings for the last 11 years before you get a figure that high, remarkable considering how many more millions of flights there are today than 35 years ago. Plagues? Please. Even today, April 14, 2020, you are much less likely to die of a disease than at any point in human history. Even as weapons get more destructive, we become more safe. I will cede to Mr. blunt that millennials experience more cybercrime than, say, the ancient Mesopotamians, though if sm0ke_blunt would like to trade places, he should know that the average life expectancy for a Mesopotamian is about 40, and that's after throwing out the dizzying high infant mortality rate (which, by the way, is lower across the world now than ever before). Besides, most individuals of cybercrime are baby boomers or older.
Which brings me to one of the reasons I simply don't understand this row between generations. Are boomers, gen Xers and even the greatest generation also not going through this right now? In what way is 9/11, the Great Recession and COVID exclusively millennial crises? I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, have a clear memory of the change that 9/11 brought and was in the workforce for four months when the Great Recession hit. Oh, and I was nominally unemployed when COVID hit the United States. Would I trade places with my father? What, and live through the loss of public trust in the presidency (twice, now, as it turns out), wait in line for gas, watch the country tear itself apart in 1968, all without cell phones and personal computers and THEN live through all that's happened in my lifetime? I get the benefit of The Beatles (which, by the way, I can stream now whenever I like) without having to hope nobody I know gets fucking drafted. Seriously, watch the 1969 draft lottery, you will know someone whose birthday gets called. My brother's is in that video. "Can’t stop thinking about how anyone who is a millennial or younger has literally never known stability," says a self-described former MTV VJ. Watch Forrest Gump, does that seem particularly stable to you?
How about my grandfather? Born in America but speaking one language at home and one at school, the world was literally at war when he was born and not for the last time, either. Wait a minute, did I say school? I mean, he went but only when it was convenient for him not to be in the fields. When he was 14, the stock market crashed and stayed that way for more than a decade. When he was 25 the world went to war with itself again (do you even know how big of a brick we all would shit if Britain and Germany went to war with each other today? It's literally unthinkable). Then add the troubles of the years of my father's generation up to 9/11 (Papa died two years later). Except for seeing the Cardinals win the World Series nine times in his lifetime, there's very little about the environmental circumstances of Papa's life that I find enviable.
You want to go earlier than that? Then you're dealing with levels of racism, class inequality, violence and public ill-health that we can only imagine. The fact that you are reading this, meaning that you can read, makes you an anomaly of human history.
The lack of self-awareness by members of a generation often blighted for its lack of self-awareness is underlined by the need to bitch about the world using Twitter on their iPhones, technological magic beyond the imaginations of previous generations (to be clear, I find certain Baby Boomer's dismissals of millennials to be equally eye-roll-worty). Every generation has its problems, every generation has its benefits, but no generation gets to pick and choose. You can't say "I want the affordable luxuries of travel and technology of 2020 with the employment stability of 1970." It boils down to human nature's ugliest emotion—self-pity.
Moments like these are designed to make us think about what we don't have. Like many of you, I would have loved to watched The Masters this weekend and gone to church services with my family and friends. But I can't lose sight of the fact that I'm talking to you now via a transmission system that is instant and global, I'm writing in a beautifully appointed climate-controlled home filled with people I love who are, for the moment, perfectly healthy. Others among us are not as lucky and I am not belittling anyone's suffering during this time but each of us have things to be grateful for. I've been described as an old soul, with my mania for opera and old movies, my center of pop cultural gravity is about 1860. Would I be happier if I were born in an earlier time? I very much doubt it. Would my life have been different if the recession hadn't hit when I was professionally vulnerable and newly arrived in a big, expensive city? I don't know and I can't know, so where's the profit in wondering? Instead of choosing to be miserable for not living the life I theoretically might have, I'm spending this extraordinary time choosing to be happy that I'm leading the one I am, seeing as it's the only one I've got.