Catching up with yesterday's New York Times Sunday Styles section, I read the article about all those poor college graduates whose dreams of going on a road trip or landing a cushy internship or spending the summer in Rome or moving to New York on Daddy's dime have been crushed by this pesky bad economy. It got me thinking about this generation, born between 1980 and the early 90s or up to 2000, depending on who you ask, which has the most designations of any generation that has gone before. They're called Generation Y, because, well, duh, they come after Generation X (1965 to 1980). They're also called the Echo Generation, because they are, it's said, the offspring of Baby Boomers—which doesn't quite ring true because it's entirely possible that Gen Xers who had kids in their early 20s now have kids who would fall into that category too.
They're also called Millennials, which makes no sense at all because they were born before the actual millennium, so where does that leave all the babies who were actually born in the millennium? And they're called Trophy Kids, because they grew up in a time of ultra-competitive kids' sports when the powers that be declared that there were no losers, only winners, so everybody takes home a prize.
For the last, oh, five to ten years now, this overly scrutinized generation has been the subject of endless articles and documentaries and 20/20 reports analyzing and speculating on everything from these kids' digital prowess to their consuming habits to their aversion to print to their fashion sense to their multitasking abilities to their computer addictions to their Rainbow Parties to their oversharing tendencies and on and on ad infinitum. It wasn't so long ago—last year, to be exact—that we were hearing all about how Boomer bosses were scrambling to cope with this new generations' haughty attitudes in the workplace, where they sauntered about oozing with entitlement, plugged into their iPods, refusing to make coffee or run errands and expecting to be allowed to update their Facebook pages all day long and still get paid.
Now, these poor young souls don't even have a workplace in which to be misunderstood. We've robbed them of the be-anything-you-want-to-be future they were born to inherit. Doesn't your heart just bleed?
I think they deserve a fifth designation: Generation Woe Is Me.
Yes indeed, it must be just horrible to be a young person today. After all, no generation ever before has experienced a setback of these proportions. Not that huge generation who came of age during the Great Depression, or the lean, mean 70s, or the dotcom-9/11 double-whammy earlier this very decade, or—gee, golly—the panic of 1819. No, it's this generation whose whole entire life has just been like totally ruined.
Generation Woe Is Me just needs to get a grip. One of the things I've noticed happening more now that ever before in my whole entire life is the tendency of Young People to brag about how young they are, and how they revel in using their youth as an excuse for ignorance. I used to work with a girl like this, at a magazine whose main subject was television. In editorial meetings, references to landmark classic shows surfaced all the time: All in the Family, for instance, or Maude. And she'd kind of poke out her lip and shrug and say, a bit too cheerfully, "I don't know that show, I'm too young!" And then, I swear, she'd preen as she said it, all "cutchie cutchie coo, look at me, I'm just a sweet young thang!"
It used to annoy the crap out of me, mostly because I'd never have dreamed, at her age or any other, to walk into a meeting and brag about what I didn't know. Bizarrely, she scored points for this with the editor-in-chief, who was relatively new to the job, in his fifties, and, to be frank, a big dunderhead who soon made it clear that he was much more interested in what pretty young girls had to say than people who knew what the hell they were talking about. (To be fair, this place was also full of fifty-and-beyond-somethings who loved to reminisce about Howdy Doody; everything about that place was so annoying, I developed an eye twitch.)
I thought of this whole sorry situation when I watched that recent episode of Real Time With Bill Maher when Paul Begala went off on a nervous, babbling, out-of-her-league Meghan McCain for pulling the same trick. There was a discussion about whether Obama places too much blame on the previous administration. McCain—who by the way was as heavily made up as Lindsay Lohan trying to cover up the previous night's coke binge— said she thinks he does; Begala said he thinks he doesn't do it nearly enough. He went on to mention that Ronald Regan had a habit of pointing his hoary finger at Jimmy Carter for every little thing, and she interjected defensively, "I wasn't born yet so I don't know." And Begala shot back, "I wasn't born during the French Revolution but I know about it."And the audience roared.
I wish I'd said something like that to Miss "I'm Too Young" back at that meeting that day. I guess I'm saying it now, to every single crybaby in that whole generation.
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