I’m writing this early Wednesday morning, so please forgive me for any erroneous remarks or grammatical/spelling errors. My brain is not functioning at one-hundred percent. It’s Ilya’s birthday and a bunch of us crazy no-job-having kids are going to spend the day in Joshua Tree. It should be a real hoot, and by “hoot” I mean a day filled with excess and vice.
Boston.com, your one-stop website for the finest in journalism, has posted an article from the Boston Globe Magazine called “The New Me Generation,” about recent college graduates coming into the workforce and not taking shit from anybody. That’s right, somebody finally noticed there are a great many young people in America who are tired of having to respect aging ‘boomers who don’t know what they’re doing in the workplace, and wrote an article about it.
The opening paragraph might as well have been transcribed from any conversation I’ve had with a friend in the past five years. A fifteen-year-old girl pictures her future in a boss-less, career-less world. Like many of us, even this teenager understands that there is no appeal in working for somebody else, especially if that somebody else is an overpaid, out-of-touch baby boomer who can’t come to grips with the fact that their job could be done easily by a child. These old farts are quite quick to state that one must “pay their dues” before they can climb the corporate ladder, but those are the same people who come home from work and beg their children to teach them how to send an instant message or create a contact list in Gmail.
I think it’s quite ironic that my generation has been labeled “The Entitlement Generation,” by some the most selfish, self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent people who have ever lived. They re-elected Reagan even after he steered our society towards a microscopic upper class and an immeasurable second class. Of course, none of the ‘boomers noticed this because they so embraced his selfish “Greed Is Good” ideals and aspired to become rich and forget everybody else along the way. Our grandparents were tough people. They cared only for their kin. Children needed roofs over their heads, clothes to wear, and financial security so they could be better educated. Our parents are not tough people. They play fantasy baseball, join fitness centers, and do everything they can to better their own chances for survival. They were spoiled babies who grew their hair long, got high, fucked around and only rallied against the Vietnam War when the crisis escalated and they risked being sent off to fight. Fast forward thirty years, and now that they’ve comfortably moved into their McMansions, they see no problem sending the children of working-class families overseas to fight a war for them.
Yeah right. Us? Entitlement Generation? I laugh at this notion.
I also laugh when I read this section of the Wikipedia entry for “Baby Boomers”
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