In Defense of My Generation

Today I'm piggy-backing off my buddy, Eric Clapp's, post defending our generation, though in some ways I don't want to. The proliferation of social media has made my generation's faults all the more evident. Our politics is often narrow and far too idealistic--whether on the right or the left. We are the generation of people like Lindsay Lohan and Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino. We're brash and inexperienced, captive to technology, lazy and often shortsighted. We treat the internet like our playground and become captive by the vastness of it. So often we'd rather just watch tv than change the world.

Some call us the "boomerang generation"

But then again...

We are a generation with fresh eyes, who sees the world's problems and has the capability of saying, "Nah, I think we can do better." We love to give away. We're willing to think for ourselves. We know what's going on in the world--even if our opinions on it are subject to change. We don't carry the burden of hatred that is not easily shed by earlier generations. At our best, we're more than tolerant--we're respectful and interested.

All of this is to say that we are like every generation that has gone before. We are considered immature by the same people we consider dated, and in forty or fifty years we'll be the dated ones grumbling over the immaturity of those to come. Everything I've said above is true, at least in part. We are all sorts of good and bad because we stand on the shoulders of all the good and bad who have gone before. We're different--technology, economics and social structures have made us so. But just because things change doesn't mean that we reject the past. The past lives on through us, and the more we hear about it the more we can learn from it.

Eric says that he thinks we are going to do just fine. I think it can be even better than that. As the world is changing, we have the ability to be the next greatest generation: a generation that helps to end famine, to shed hatred, to fix an economic structure that pits the least against the greatest, to change how we view energy, to revolutionize science and technology all over again, to demonstrate what is beautiful about the human spirit, to vanquish diseases, to answer tough social questions, to love each other for our differences, and to pass off to the next generation the burden that they stand on the shoulders of giants.

I hope we can do it.