Our Children:
Millennials say they are more focused on the environment than their parents’ generation, 76% to 24%, according to a new poll.
The poll – commissioned by the Clinton Global Initiative and Microsoft, and provided exclusively to msnbc – found that 66% of millennials say there is “solid evidence” the earth is getting warmer, and 75% of those respondents say human activity is responsible for it.
The term
"Millennials" was coined in 1987, "around the time 1982-born children were entering preschool and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the millennial year 2000." At that time the "Year 2000" meant nothing beyond an awesomely rounded date on the Western calendar--a seemingly
key benchmark of human progress. The "millennials" were widely expected to embody the spirit of that milestone event, but the character of their "transformation" into that brave new world was murky and unknown.
Of course, 2000 is the year George W. Bush became President, and he began working transformations of his own. By the circumstance of an election nearly all of them were too young to vote in, the fate of this generation was inextricably tied with the fatal consequences of his Presidency, the trillion dollar war he had no intention of paying for, the tax cuts and deregulation that ran the country over a cliff. As pre-teens they had no voice when Hillary Clinton's husband signed legislation transforming the banks into carnival barkers and sleazy auction houses. They had no say in any of these things that were done to pave the way for their current economic situation, nor any say in the Reagan years that preceded it.
Names for this "Generation" abound--"Generation "We"; The "Net Generation"; "Generation Next"--as if the act of categorizing them could wash away the indifference and complacency that deprived them of a future. Today, scholarly articles, surveys, polls, and think-tank "analyses" that feed a corporate media made up of the rich and successful continue to depict millions of young people as disengaged, narcissistic, uninformed, and downright spoiled. These portrayals tend to suggest the Millennials suddenly appeared out of nowhere and by their own volition manifested themselves as every dismal consequence and embodiment of their predecessors' guilty conscience. The children-our children--of this "generation" have become a convenient dumping ground for everything that every generation preceding them, particularly the baby boomers, got wrong.
The caricature of this generation is that of a young man or woman with a college degree, working for 12 dollars an hour at Starbucks, or at an unpaid internship on Wall Street. They are burdened by colossal student loan debt, and forced to live in their parents' homes well into their twenties. And indeed, there are plenty of those young people.
But there is another vast subset of "Millennials" who don't have the "luxury" of being burdened simply by loan debts. These are the ones the media, the think tanks, the pundits and the analysts tend to ignore. They don't show up in feature articles lamenting the lack of employment opportunity of the "barista" class, or bemoaning the prevalence of high student loan debt. But they are as much a part of this generation as those others.
There is a demographic group in crisis today, though they’re rarely discussed. Occasionally, they’re used as a foil on conservative cable news shows, where overpaid hosts sneer derisively at their endemic “laziness.” Sometimes, members of Congress will trot them out as straw men to drum up support in rural districts.
These millennials – young, undereducated, poor and, all too often, minorities – exist in a state of permanent crisis, victims of a new economic disenfranchisement that took root in the Great Recession and, in the years since, has stubbornly remained. We’re only now beginning to grasp its full scope — and its potential implications for our nation’s future.
It is a future they can't even hope to share with the rest of us. Here is their reality:
A recent Pew Research study, “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College,” has made some of the more troubling realities that these kids face exceptionally clear: As an increasingly large share of young Americans earn degrees from institutions of higher learning, the remaining millennials are getting left further and further behind. Americans aged 25-32 without any time at college earn $17,500 less per year than their college-educated peers.
Youth unemployment historically tracks at twice the national average, regardless of the economy’s health. While 7 percent unemployment is certainly a national crisis, it also augurs an even bigger issue — a staggeringly high underemployment rate for young Americans. Seven years past the recession, the youth underutilization rate remains stubbornly high: above 40 percent for 16-19-year-olds, and nearly 30 percent for millennials aged 20-24.
Put more plainly, none have it worse than undereducated millennials. Among this group, almost half are either unemployed, have given up on the labor market entirely, or been forced to work low-wage, part-time gigs...[.]
Yet even with all of these headwinds blowing in their faces, the spoiled, narcissistic "millennials" still seem to have a good grasp on how to cope with the conditions that have been foisted upon them, conditions for which they are not responsible:
[M]ore than two-thirds of respondents said they are willing to pay more for products from sustainability-focused companies.
and:
The poll found more than half of the respondents optimistic about their chances at improving the state of human rights during their lifetimes. Millennials also appear to be optimistic that they can fix gender income inequality, with 69% of respondents saying they think their generation will make progress in closing the pay gap between men and women.
Both major political parties see the demographic as "up for grabs" and both have pursued their vote by attempting to "speak" to the generation's supposed interests--the Democrats with their focus on raising the minimum wage, equal rights for same-sex couples and half-hearted attempts to make college more affordable, the Republicans with lame efforts to connect like
this. None of this putative "outreach" seems likely to generate the type of enthusiasm that could drive these young people to the polls. But it isn't for lack of trying to "understand" what motivates them, to better "communicate" and "talk" to them.
If the political parties wanted to really talk to these young people, they could do worse than by acknowledging who they really are, and why we bear the responsibility for what happened to them. That they are our children and we let them down.
And then, maybe an Apology.