Why Generation X is Way Cooler Than Millennials
Generation X rules. Millennials drool. Tweet it, post it, Snapchat it, or throw it on whatever the latest app is. Anyway you cut it, those of us born between 1961 and 1981 (GenX) are the cool kids wearing leather jackets, sitting on our V-twin cruisers, smoking cigarettes, and laughing at you ban-happy snowflake Millennials (born 1982 to 2004) with your man-buns and hysterics over the mere mention of Donald Trump’s name written in chalk. Hold onto your organic non-GMO soy lattes, because here are 5 reasons why GenX is way cooler than the Millennials.
1. The Anti-Free Speech Movement
You can’t find a college campus today without a “safe space,” where the first amendment plays second fiddle to the thoughts and feelings of the youthful ignorant masses who are “triggered” by anything other than their extremist, often communist, ideology. Case in point. In the 1990s The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler, was considered an edgy feminist performance that was met with plenty of criticism, but accepted as free speech. Today, it’s cancelled at college campuses for excluding women who don’t have a vagina (i.e., transgendered people). We’ve gone from a culture that valued differences of opinion and real diversity to one that shirks away from having any kind of opinion whatsoever, and we did it in only one generation. Millennials, for example, might try to call a strict religious doctrine that requires women to cover their faces “feminist” and claim any criticism is “aggressive” or “hateful,” while a Generation X’er will more likely tell you it’s idiotic to throw homosexuals from buildings or to mutilate little girls, even if the majority of Muslims don’t engage in such practices. Sure, it’s true that the underpinnings of the anti-free speech movement began in our own adolescent years (1980s and 1990s), but what we called “political correctness” was really just a debate over how we should conduct ourselves in diverse groups. Today speech restrictions have been codified by colleges and other public institutions with the threat of being kicked out of school, being roughed up, or even arrested for thinking outside of the lines.
2. Everything isn’t “racist”
Neal Boortz, a nationally-syndicated Libertarian radio host out of Atlanta who was on the air for 40 years before his retirement, was known for pulling no punches when it came to his views on everything from government, to crime, and especially race relations. Often called a racist by those who disagreed with him, his response was usually to ask the offended party to define the term. Undoubtedly they couldn’t. Can you? Millennials like to claim everyone is racist if the person with whom they disagree is of a different race, but they can’t often define the term either. Racism is believing in the genetic superiority of one race over another. It’s real. It exists, and it’s far more dangerous than the more common form of hate known as “bigotry.” With real racism, you get goose-stepping storm troopers marching in unison and looking at different groups of people like they’re animals. Racism allows evil to rationalize its vile behavior because those who commit atrocities like the Nazis can fool themselves into believing they’re not dealing with actual people.
Complaining about everything from a reasonable criticism of Obamacare to dog poop, Millennials often feel that the best method for getting their way is to try to scare the opponent with name-calling. Ad hominem attacks aren’t new, or restricted to Millennials, but it seems to be the default on college campuses today. More young people need to learn to refute the argument effectively.
3. Smartphone Zombies
Millennials are literally getting themselves killed behind the wheel because of driving while distracted by their phones. They are the most likely to suffer fatalities behind the wheel because they can’t stop looking at social media long enough to drive somewhere. Even for a bear, it’s hard to walk down the street without almost bumping into some Millennial kid playing Pokemon Go or whatever. While it’s true that people of any age can be distracted by their phones, Millennials take it to a new level. They can’t even put their phones down while going to the bathroom or having sex! While it’s a good thing that people can be connected almost anywhere (such as in the event of an emergency), it’s not necessarily great that they are constantly connected. There are droves of young people wandering the streets, their faces lit up from beneath with an eerie blue glow, seemingly unaware of the world around them. We GenX’ers had our pagers and blocky cell phones, but it was a convenience, not a way of life. Maybe if we’d had Facebook and iPhones in the 1980s, we’d have been the same way. Baby Boomer grandparents and Generation X parents are ignoring their grandchildren and children in favor of the smartphone, too. It’s a problem for everyone, but young people who are developing their identities in an uncertain time have to learn to put the phones down, unplug from the matrix for a little while, and smell the roses.
4. Real relationships
We GenX’ers had friends. Even if some of them were actually jerks, it taught us how to handle awkward situations, deal with people, and communicate without being some kind of total jackass. If we wanted to play a 2-player Super Mario Brothers game, someone had to get on his or her bike and ride over to the other person’s house. Of course we didn’t get out as much as our parents did. Baby Boomers pretty much lived outside as kids in the 1950s and 1960s, but we still got together in the real world.
This morning at Starbucks I exchanged pleasantries, said “please” and “thank you,” and made eye contact with my barista. While waiting on my order, I noticed a young Millennial girl in super bright pink pants and hair that was dripping wet stare down at her phone, never bothering to look up, and mumble her order for some kind of frothy cappuccino drink that I’ve never heard of. “Uh-huh” was the extent of her vocabulary in that brief exchange. In my youth, if someone behaved like that we’d assume, correctly, that he or she was a snob. Today, I think it’s more about ignorance. That young girl in pink pants simply doesn’t have enough experience or practice in talking to people in the real world.
The older group of GenX’ers had no Internet. Those of us who grew up in the 1990s remember the AOL busy signal as we tried repeatedly to dial up using a 28.8 Kbps modem. The Internet was a novelty, and even then there were some flames thrown online due to the newfound anonymity of the web. Today kids are far more vicious online, whether anonymous or not. It seems like almost everyday a teenager is driven to commit suicide by the horrendous taunting at the hands of cyberbullies.
Let me share a bit of “old man” GenX wisdom. We were considered apathetic and aimless in our youth, and the big spending Baby Boomers worried about us, too. But no matter what age you’re living in, what you are in high school isn’t what you will be in life. Those labels don’t mean squat in the real world. Give it some time and you’ll discover your own power to set your life’s course. Be a little more like us and shrug it off as if you don’t even care. You Millennials tend to stress more than we did, so stop doing that to yourselves.
5. Music.
Justin Bieber is a Millennial.
Kurt Cobain was Generation X.
Enough said.
It’s important to state that Millennials aren’t all bad. They really are focused on changing the world, even though most of them think they’re doing it one tweet at a time, somehow. A new poll showed that 23% of Millennials are supporting Gary Johnson for president, which is worth a lot of cool points. Unfortunately the same poll showed that twice that number are supporting Hillary Clinton, and the vast majority of them want to remove constitutional freedoms and get free stuff. Perhaps they’ll grow out of it with time. Personally, I’m hoping Generation Z has some answers, just as soon as they’re done watching Spongebob Squarepants and whining about their 9 o’clock PM bedtimes on school nights, that is.