This book reads as if it were written in 1995 instead of 2000
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Once upon a time, the Millennial Generation was a generation of happy children. During the Reagan and Poppy Bush years and the early Clinton years, we romped around in our '80s clothes, studied hard in school and learned to "stay away from drugs" from after-school specials. The economy was good, and even when it took a dip in the recession that had Generation X freaking out in the early '90s, we were blissfully unaware of it. Clean air, we believed, was just around the corner. America was going to save the spotted owl, conquer AIDS, eradicate heroin and crack use and put a man on Mars by the beginning of the new millennium. A few of our schools made us wear uniforms, but we were too young to even care.
Two authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, wrote a book called Generations in which they gave us a name and predicted that in the future our life would be more of the same: more working in teams, more upbeatness, more basking in the limelight of being special kids.
Then came a sudden call for curfews wherein teens could be arrested just for standing out of their house at a certain hour. Schools started banning all sorts of clothes, backpacks and behaviors. Students were suspended from school without due process. We watched as our peers got in trouble for things the principal made up or simply didn't like. Adults told us loud-throatedly that we were nothing but minors who didn't have any rights, people who weren't protected by the Constitution to the extent that adults could do anything they wanted to us. Where we had once learned that America gave everyone equality and freedom of speech and religion, we were now told that we couldn't speak what we thought about the government if our parents didn't want us to. This was what America, whose flag we had saluted for years, had in store for us: status as subhumans. We read newspaper and magazine articles and watched news hours talk about how kids were soooooo bad. The counterculture started to hold an appeal as we realized why Generation X before us had taken to it. Drug use rose instead of falling as Millennials entered high school, and we found styles like skater-punk, hip-hop, hipster, goth or emo. We discovered music like Sublime, Third Eye Blind, Cake, Bush, No Doubt, the Walldlowers, White Town and the Verve. Bill Clinton praised curfews, along with praising uniforms, and spoke of putting a uniform on every boy and girl in my generation who was now beginning high school, just as we realized the self-expressive value of clothing.
With our less innocent style, many store managers asked Millennials to leave their stores. Everyone heard about someone being arrested for "trespassing" in a place that was ostensibly open to the public. People called the police on Millennials, or sometimes [your town's name here]'s finest would just look around for teens to harass. The people Millennials had expected to defend them instead said things to the effect of, "It's the manager's business, he can do whatever he wants with it". People wanted to afford unlimited power in the name of the rights of a business?!? We were no longer a pro-corporate generation, but had been turned into an anti-corporate one. Many of us found the cause of anti-globalization. We saw how corporations could hurt the environment, while the corporation-friendly Kurfew Klinton, who had revealed himself to be a liar, was unable to see it thanks to his "Third Way" pseudoliberalism. In 1999, it was our generation who was protesting in the streets of Seattle against the WTO and the corporate machine. We actually succeeded in stopping it for a little while. In the worldwide riots, one of our own, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead by cops given to defending the status quo. When 1980-born Shawn Fanning invented Napster, we all thought it was a really cool way to share music. As the class of 2000 entered college that summer, we were looking forward to using Napster on our colleges' computers. A&M Records then filed a copyright lawsuit against it under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and adults fumed that we were violating "intellectual property rights". Just think about this new imaginary construct: a kind of "property" akin to your car, your dog or your copy of Generations. Millennials who had escaped being turned against the corporatist ideology so far were now driven to the left. The government now represented a persecution of people who enjoyed a great computer service. The looming spectacle of Columbine was being abused, all the meanwhile, to justify the oppression of Millennials in high schools.
In spite of the developments of the last four years, William Strauss and Neil Howe published in September of 2000 a book called Millennials Rising that said we were turning out just as they expected us to in Generations. They did not acknowledge our erstwhile rebellion. Rather, they wrote about rebellion as something Millennials WILL do in a future era, and even then, what they describe is hardly rebellion as most of us define the word: "They will rebel against the culture by cleaning it up; rebel against political cynicism by touting trust; rebel against individualism by stressing teamwork; rebel against adult pessimism by going positive; and rebel against societal ennui by actually getting a few things done". In short, we were supposed to be culturally conservative little Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts who were friendly towards big business, big brands, adult consensus, social conventions and government. Attempts to copy Gen-X pop culture were whitewashed as something that would soon be replaced by a more "Hero-like", bland, conservative culture that we would invent in the '00s. Bizarrely, Strauss and Howe didn't call any of our music "Millennial music" unless it was Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys or N*SYNC. How hoochie Britney and the oh-so-slick boy bands are representative of the way these authors characterize Millennials is beyond me; maybe Strauss just latched on to the upbeatness of these artists and read too much into it. WTO Protests 1999 did not get a word of ink.
Later that year, events took an unexpected turn as irregularities popped up in the 2000 Election. Al Gore was being challenged by a moron who had been arrested for drunk driving, whom about half of American voters voted for anyway. Now the election looked as if it could go to George W. Bush. It was all coming down to the state of Florida. The ballots were designed with a needless complexity that was just enough to confuse geriatric voters, who had a tendency to vote Democrat. Civic workers had scared African-Americans away from the polls in the state, in an attempt to dishonestly sway the votes towards Bush. Finally, the Supreme Court stepped in and Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first Bush, cast a decisive vote in favor of the second Bush, as the Supreme Court selected the president. This was supposed to build our trust in the government...how?
In 2001 came that tragic morning of September 11. The biggest tragedy of all was the disease wrought on America by Baby Boomers and their reaction to the event. They rallied, blinded as if it were dark as midnight, around the president. This buffoon who couldn't pronounce "subliminal", one who had been selected and not elected, was now made into a sacred cow just because he was president when the attack happened and shared the same view on the terrorist attack that every other American did: that the attack and Saudi terrorists were evil. Despite all the enormities we had seen America commit, Boomers acted as if it were utter sacrilege not to wave the flag. Their reasoning was that America was great because it had been attacked. If you were living in Hitler's Germany when Allied Forces carried out their acts of war on it, would you have become loyal to Deutschland and her fuehrer just because your country was under attack? We hoped America would remember its civil liberties in light of the event, but instead the government convicted people of terrorism without trial and racially profiled people who looked as if they MIGHT be Arab. Many people called people who cared about issues other than the War on Terror "irrelevant". Older people tried to trivialize our causes, such as anti-globalization, and say that anarchists, communists and the like were equivalent to the terrorists who pulled off 9/11. National Review writer Rod Dreher stuck his tongue out at us with this little snippet: "...[T]o spend five seconds in the company of these sanctimonious kids is to be rendered incapable of taking anything they say seriously. Three thousand people died not long ago a couple of miles away, and these ninnies are ready to smash windows and go to jail because somebody, somewhere, is being mean to puppies." An event that could have united the nation was instead being used by adults in an attempt to pit conservatives against radicals and discredit radicalism.
Then came 2002. We learned that accountants at Enron had been keeping the money in their own hands and away from us by accounting fraud. Arthur Andersen was in the corner shredding its documents. And George W. Bush, the president and leader of America, had ties to Enron and always listened to its input. After Enron, we thought that no one would trust corporations anymore, and we stood there dumbfounded as our elders still did. Millennials watched Ken Lay get away and ultimately die before he was indicted. While Sherron Watkins was blowing the whistle on Enron, Cynthia Cooper blew the whistle on Worldcom. Strauss and Howe write about a generation that will be loyal to its employers as the GI's were when they were young and working. This year exterminated the possibility of our generation ever being loyal to corporations in the future. We knew the money would just go to greedy and dishonest people above us. Then in August of that year, 425 Millennials were arrested by Houston police, again with ersatz charges of "trespassing". Hello?!? They were in a K-Mart, doing things like playing video games. Strauss and Howe thought that the events of our youth would build trust in the police. Not with the way they've always treated OUR generation!
Then came 2003. A war that was clearly being fought for oil was fought in Iraq by Bush. He said the reason was weapons of mass destruction, but despite the government's cause for war there were no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons found (not one!) in the country after the invasion was over. Gee, this really teaches Millennials that government does the right thing, doesn't it? The man who was behind this was a liar whom Boomers praised as a "strong leader". All the protesting and letters to Bush in the world couldn't stop him. Our loud and uncouth elders spurted that it didn't matter whether this war was right or wrong, that unity was the most important thing and we were to rally around Bush right or wrong so we could remain patriots. The system went awry like an evil robot. We watched as Peter Arnett got fired, and Dale Petroskey kept the anti-war Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon from appearing at the fifteenth-anniversary celebration of Bull Durham saying they have an "obligation to act and speak responsibly". All the free speech we had been taught in elementary school the United States stood for looked to be a lie, and by now many of us had learned in high school history about the Alien and Sedition Acts. With so many Millennials joining the protest movement, you'd think Strauss and Howe would give up on their 1991 predictions for the Millennial Generation by now. The lesson, in the end, was that government can and will lie when it suits its elected (and selected) officials' personal wishes.
We all lived through 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007, and with each passing year the Boomer-driven system progressively trashed and cared less about Millennials. American troops have stayed and been shot at in Iraq, and the members of our generation saw their peers being killed...killed for what? George W. Bush went on to talk about starting a war in Iran, while it was revealed that he knew Iran had already dismantled its WMD program. Millennials can expect more people their age to die in Iran now for a transparent war. While Boomers and Xers saw Watergate and became less trustful of the government, we saw the president commute the sentence of I. Lewis Libby. In Millennials Rising, Strauss and Howe write that Millennials will get behind the leader of a crisis like World War II to the point where they (and their leader) will be unstoppable. They will not protest when they are drafted, and they will see war as a call to "public action and achievement" (or some other Straussese phrase, I forget the exact wording). Some Millennials have seen Iraq as a call to public action and greatness and have joined the military, but most of us have viewed it as an oil war. And a generation is defined by where MOST of its members lie, right? An S&H Millennial wouldn't know a real Millennial today if they met on the street. Millennials have been so disenfranchised by the politicians, the media, the police, even the educational system, that we'll never return again to the innocent, not-an-ounce-of-alienation kids we were in 1995.
The Strauss and Howe characterization of Millennials was already out-of-date at the time they wrote Millennials Rising, and it is more than a decade out-of-date now. I recommend Jean Twenge's Generation Me or Mike Males' Framing Youth as books that deal with this generation in a timeless, hits-the-spot way.
So inaccurate....
Customer Rating: I highly disagree with the contention that Millenials are corporate-loving, wholesome, "heroic", young adults.
I am 24, on the cusp really of Gen X and Gen Y.
I actually feel like the Millenials are very similiar to Gen X.
They are definitely more tolerant and socially liberal.
However economically they are getting the shaft big time, thanks to the Boomers consumerism, and the government expecting the boomers to give us Millenials everything on a silver platter. That is a huge stereotype.
People don't go to college because they are more "civic". They go because it's almost impossible to land a job these days without a degree. I have a BA and had one heck of a time living a stable life so I am currently in graduate school.
The only real assessments I agree with are: that we are technologically more literate, more "group" oriented, and have more opportunities to excel. However, there are way more obstacles to economic success and the current leadership in Washington, at least, could seem to care less.
