https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opini...trump.html
EXCERPT: Mocking millennials has become a sport and a pastime. You’ve heard most of the complaints: about the trophies for showing up, the Instagramming of tedium, the use of Venmo to buy street drugs. They ruined lunch, motorcycles and marriage. They gave us selfies at funerals and placenta pix from the delivery room. [...] they’ve made doorbells obsolete (better to text), vacations passé (too busy) and face-to-face conversations a lost art (see doorbells). They prefer liquid soap to a simple bar. They’re killing the Post Office, phasing out breakfast cereal, dashing dinner dates. Ditto mayonnaise; in the era of identity condiments, it’s too bland. They’re the Lamest Generation.
[...But...] Boomers gave us Donald Trump, the draft-dodging, tax-evading, wife-cheating poster child for ’60s-bred self-indulgence. It’s boomers who are bankrupting the nation with a trillion-dollar deficit from a selfish tax cut. And it’s boomers who are ignoring climate change while the earth convulses and heads toward an early end. I’ve given up hope that boomers can rescue us from the tyranny of the Trump age. [...]
But the moment of greatness will soon arrive for millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996. Within a year or so, there are projected to be more of them among eligible voters than us. This is good. Millennials are more progressive and unafraid of change. They are forward-looking. They are more appalled by Trump and his party than any other generation. Their lie detectors are first-rate.
But millennials have one glaring, society-crushing character problem [...] They truly don’t vote. Too many have checked out of the whole citizen-power thing. You can blame the lack of civics education during their formative years, when not enough of them studied the owner’s manual of democracy. Now it’s a pain in the butt, an afterthought, or OMG, is there an election? Or you can blame a dozen other reasons.
The numbers tell a shameful story. Barely half of all eligible millennial voters cast a ballot in the last presidential election, compared with nearly 70 percent of baby boomers and the two generations older than them. The midterms are far worse....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opini...trump.html
EXCERPT: Mocking millennials has become a sport and a pastime. You’ve heard most of the complaints: about the trophies for showing up, the Instagramming of tedium, the use of Venmo to buy street drugs. They ruined lunch, motorcycles and marriage. They gave us selfies at funerals and placenta pix from the delivery room. [...] they’ve made doorbells obsolete (better to text), vacations passé (too busy) and face-to-face conversations a lost art (see doorbells). They prefer liquid soap to a simple bar. They’re killing the Post Office, phasing out breakfast cereal, dashing dinner dates. Ditto mayonnaise; in the era of identity condiments, it’s too bland. They’re the Lamest Generation.
[...But...] Boomers gave us Donald Trump, the draft-dodging, tax-evading, wife-cheating poster child for ’60s-bred self-indulgence. It’s boomers who are bankrupting the nation with a trillion-dollar deficit from a selfish tax cut. And it’s boomers who are ignoring climate change while the earth convulses and heads toward an early end. I’ve given up hope that boomers can rescue us from the tyranny of the Trump age. [...]
But the moment of greatness will soon arrive for millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996. Within a year or so, there are projected to be more of them among eligible voters than us. This is good. Millennials are more progressive and unafraid of change. They are forward-looking. They are more appalled by Trump and his party than any other generation. Their lie detectors are first-rate.
But millennials have one glaring, society-crushing character problem [...] They truly don’t vote. Too many have checked out of the whole citizen-power thing. You can blame the lack of civics education during their formative years, when not enough of them studied the owner’s manual of democracy. Now it’s a pain in the butt, an afterthought, or OMG, is there an election? Or you can blame a dozen other reasons.
The numbers tell a shameful story. Barely half of all eligible millennial voters cast a ballot in the last presidential election, compared with nearly 70 percent of baby boomers and the two generations older than them. The midterms are far worse....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opini...trump.html
