Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Millennials

We're the generation that can communicate with anyone, anywhere on the planet, at any time, speaking to them through little machines like they were right next to us.
We're the generation that can go to a different universe and live in it for days, killing dragons with magic and building houses with stone we've collected while making friends with aliens or humans or elves. We can do all of this by moving two of our fingers.
We're the generation that can access and process almost all of the information in the world, current and past, in our homes. We can instantly watch what is happening 300,000 miles away, like we were there. We can access free history, free opinions on history, free counter-theories on that history, free different perspectives on that history, at any moment. We can look up any word in any language for free. We can listen to the opinions, the blogs and the facebooks and the twitters, of most human beings on the planet, whenever we care to listen.
Most of us carry a little device in our pocket, five inches long and three inches wide, that gives us all of this at any time we want.
We're the generation where for a month's pay we can visit a different world in a day, where people look differently than we do and speak differently than we do and have differently shaped houses and clothes and think differently than we do. But when all of this is stripped away, we still all need to love and feel happy and eat and sleep and work, and the easier it is for us to visit one another, the smaller the world becomes, the more we realize that we are all neighbors, all needing one another to get by.
We're the generation that treats people like they're people, no matter what they look like or what they do. At least we're trying to be.
Yes, we're lazy. We get so caught up in our magic machinery, our alternate universes and our instantaneous communication that we put little emphasis on money and a 9-5 job and an education. I guess our little phones keep telling us that education doesn't get us a job. Our phones keep telling us 9-5 jobs don't make you happier or a better person. Our phones keep telling us that people of different races, different sexual orientations, different religions and different genders are people with just as many flaws and just as much goodness as anybody else.
So stop making fun of us. We're in our twenties and thirties, and our phones tell us how when you were kids, you were doing drugs, being racist and inventing the trends we're still following today. We're your children and your grandchildren. Give us some time, let's see what we can do.


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