I swallowed another bite of pancakes, having no choice
but to listen to the voices nearby. Their geriatric opinions floated out in all
directions inside the Missouri restaurant where we all sat comfortably eating
breakfast while millennial waiters hovered nearby, serving us. I frowned as I
heard the global generalizations by the old-timers and the pessimistic view
they held of their grandchildren’s grip on their baton, long passed.
It seems every generation has a dim view of the next.
“Back in our day,”
the rhetoric begins, “we got up at four a.m. to milk the cows then walked to
school uphill both ways OR never
bought new OR never heard of cell
phones OR watched tv by listening to
a dresser-sized radio, OR . . .” You
fill in the blanks.
Back in their
day, the weary story goes, the choices they were forced to make based on the
resources available to them were somehow superior. Right. I still remember the
eight hundred square foot building—one giant room—filled with six-foot tall steel
boxes which lined the perimeter of the space. “This is what a computer looks
like,” the man bragged, proudly leading me on a tour of his employer’s 1970 facility.
“Wow,” I said in amazement.
Now, nearly every six-year-old I know has his own
personal iPad and can access more information than that entire room of salvage
metal ever did.
But just because some tasks are easier than they used
to be, does that mean baby boomers like me, or Generation X, or current millennials
don’t appreciate hard work? Definitely there are some, just as there have
always been some, but so far I’ve never met them. Every Starbucks where I go to
feed my addiction is run by twenty-somethings with bright smiles who arrived
there at three a.m. to open up at four and went to bed the previous night at
eleven (if they were lucky) after studying for their college classes. The only
thing I get up for at three a.m. is to go to the bathroom.
Guess the old man wasn’t talking about barristas.
Nor did he seem to be criticizing the young waitress
who kept his coffee cup full, as she did every morning when he and his party appeared,
delivering their heavy breakfast platters despite her torn rotator cuff. (Well,
as I implied, they were talking
pretty loud. I could recite the names of their children and maybe a couple of
phone numbers they mentioned, too, but it’s not very interesting.) If their
waitress was the target of their criticism, I hope she spat in their grits.
So, where is this
lazy age group who doesn’t want to work? Who’s ruining the America built by the
Greatest Generation? Maybe they’re the ones wreaking havoc on my commute to the
grocery store by working in foul weather to improve our roads? The lazy jerks.
Probably they’re the pampered single moms who stand on
their feet all day, checking out groceries for people like me who have the luxury
of driving home to a husband who helps me unload the car.
Come to think of it, all those nurses and doctors who
take care of the old guy next to my table must have been born the day after he
was and completely support his fear of specialists half his age. Wait. No, that’s
unlikely. I’d bet a dollar this guy has outlived all his favorite doctors. Sooner
or later, though, he’s going to have to trust a physician educated in this “whole
new world” he complains about—the ones who are currently keeping him alive.
In every generation there are lazy people who’ve learned to manipulate the system and are
happy to do it. But they’re not the majority, nor do they deserve to be touted
as its mascots. I never heard the name “millennials” espoused by my
sausage-eating neighbor, but clearly they’re the ones he was referring to. He’s
not alone in his criticism. For a generation characterized by their astute
understanding of technology and social media, they’ve been surprisingly betrayed
by it. One of the worst critics of today’s young adults is the media itself.
I find that ironic. Aren’t most newscasters millennials
themselves—born between approximately 1981 and 1996?
It is a
different world. Things are changing at an unnerving pace. We’d do well to be
grateful we can leave it in the hands of millennials—the only people on earth
who can navigate Microsoft updates with one hand while changing baby diapers
with the other. Easy peasy.
I’ve got to agree with baseball player, Sam Ewing,
though—class of ’67 and a fellow baby boomer, in case you’re interested. “Parents who
wonder where the younger generation is going,” he said, “should remember where
it came from.”
Amen.
Let’s be honest. Nothing in all of history has ever
remained the same. Nothing, that is, except the way the older generation always
thinks the younger one is about to destroy civilization as they know it.
“Our earth is degenerate . . . there
are signs that the world is . . . coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are
common. Children no longer obey their parents. Every man wants to write a book,
and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
Assyrian
clay tablet, 2800 B.C.
I didn’t know they used Tablets in 2800 B.C.
Maybe the guy at Cracker Barrel was right. It is a different world.
