Actually"And Multiple Ramblings" really should be the title of my blog, but I like "Approachably Reclusive" enough to stick with it.
Anyway, let us ramble on multiply, or multiply the ramblings:
Until
TobiasBuckell
(a writer whose stuff you should read if you haven't yet) tweeted thispiece by Sierra at The Phoenix and Olive Branch,
I'd been unaware of her blog. I've rarely found a more interesting
writer on the web; after you read the long and very interesting piece
I've linked to, be sure to browse around a bit in her other writing.
Sierra
was responding to something that got some highly predictable coverage
and reactions at the time: this spring, a high school teacher at
Wellesley High School, David McCullough, delivered a commencement
speech in which he told the students that they weren't actually all
special and particularly wonderful, but in fact pretty much like all
the other graduating classes out there, and that the adults who had
told them they were super wonderful special people were mostly lying.
There was an immediate pile-on of comments, which could be
summarized as Yeah, Those Gen Ys Are Spoiled Entitled Brats With
Helicopter Parents and Nothing Like We Were, And They Need to Be Told
We Don't Like Them.
Sierra
points out, very clearly, that there are a large number of things
wrong here. The first and most important is that to the extent that
high school students think they are special and wonderful (they also
tend to think that they are disgusting and worthless; that dial has a
big jump in it at eighteen*) it is because they have been told they
are, and they didn't tell themselves that. Their idiot parents
and teachers did.
Furthermore,
she points out, unfortunately their parents were very clear about the
instrumental nature of their You are so!!!
wonderful!!! messages. Many kids, especially those with actual
ability, figured out that they hadn't done anything brilliant,
or even worthy of note, or even anything (student of mine ages
ago, asked about something on his resume, shrugged and said, "I
used to watch my tutor do it. They said it was the same as
experience.")
Thus
the large majority of Millennials—not being total gulls despite the
best efforts of their parents and teachers—perceived with full
clarity that their parents were lying to them for the sake of their
self-esteem, which at the time was believed to be sort of the Vitamin
E of the soul, without which the kids could not possibly succeed
brilliantly and carry out their duty of being little ornaments to
their parents' vanity. The self-esteem, in short, was not even really
for the selves doing the esteeming; even their self-esteem was for
their parents.
The
parents then enforced all this constant proud and meaningless babble
on coaches, teachers, and everyone else, Sierra points out. The kids
didn't insist on being constantly praised because they couldn't; kids
don't choose how adults are going to treat them. Genetically they
were the same as any other generation; they would have responded to
Victorian Muscular Christianity or Stalinist Hero Worker propaganda
just like an Edwardian Boy Scout or a 1930s Young Pioneer. The
message was chosen for them. If they overdosed on self-esteem, it was
their parents who bullied and harassed everyone else into giving it
to them.
It
is therefore absolutely unfair to the Millennials to complain that
they have an exaggerated idea of their abilities and entitlement.
They didn't give it to themselves. They didn't ask for it. They're
just stuck with it as a psychological burden to get over if they can.
Or
in the words of a hit song that is 99 years old: "you made me what I am today / I hope you're satisfied."**
Sierra
goes further, but I think not far enough, in pointing out that anyway
this is largely a class-based issue; the super-entitled
super-self-esteemed are only a small fraction of the whole
generation. Most of the Millennials were not coddled and
pushed by super-affluent helicopter parents.
Let
me digress to explain why I prefer the term snowplow parents:
1.
they clear and smooth out everything in the path
2.
their spawn thus pass easily through territory that is slippery,
difficult, or dangerous for others,
3.
as a side benefit in parental control, this makes it very hard for
the spawn to leave the path, and
4.
as a massive side benefit to both parents and children, the plow
clears the snow by piling it up in front of other people's driveways
or against their cars, thus making it much more difficult for those
who don't have snowplows for them to get onto the path.
In
short, snowplow parents is a better term than helicopter parents
because whereas a helicopter is merely hovering about to rescue the
kiddies at the first sign of trouble, a snowplow simply restructures
the world around them so there's never a need for rescue, and does so
at the expense of anyone who doesn't have their own snowplow. (I know
a couple of elementary school teachers who refer to inter-parent
clashes over the entitled spawn as snowplow collisions
and I figure I'll use that in a story sometime).
But
the true and genuine Children of the Snowplow who are so fond of
themselves and so annoy their elders are a very small fraction of
their generation: the fraction that is going to elite private
colleges, will mostly go to grad school, and is going to be cozily
slotted into the high-end corporate/nonprofit/academic/government
merry-go-round, in which they will pretend to run things because they
are superbly qualified and the world will be snowplowed to smoothness
and convenience in front of them because that is what a hereditary
aristocracy gets.*** (Most of them will not go into anything as
old-fashioned and crude as the military-industrial complex since both
the military and industry, which deal in their different ways with
the physical world, are hopelessly déclassé.)
The
supersupportivemommies and the caringdaddies did not entitle and
overpraise the whole generation of Millennials; they overpraised the
small coterie of their own children into a sense of entitlement, and
set up a mixture of real and bogus achievements to reinforce that,
but they did their best to rob the rest, making sure the playing
field was anything but level. Consider the number of high-end
entry-level jobs for which it is de rigeur to have had a couple of
internships. In many industries, nearly all such internships are
unpaid, so that the kid who has to earn an actual paycheck over the
summer by scooping ice cream or cleaning pools is out of the game
entirely compared to the one whose résumé clearly indicates that
most important ability: the ability to have parents pay all his/her
expenses in another city all summer long. Look at the way in which
college applications are evaluated extensively on extracurriculars at
the same time that fees for high school extracurriculars are
exploding; can you see a better way to keep the riffraff out?
Make
no mistake, the snowplow parents, unlike the legendary idle rich of
old, did not raise their children into the sort of cultivated
uselessness that we might associate with Holden Caulfield or My
Man Godfrey; the skids were greased and the way was smoothed, but
the kids were largely expected to perform within the narrow scope of
their failure-proofed danger-deleted lives, and so, much like a
racing thoroughbred, they can run a quarter mile oval really, really
well. Esthetically I prefer a smart, working cow pony, but if you
want to win a race, you get that thoroughbred, and as the system is
now set up, you get paid to win races, not to know about rattlesnakes
and gopher holes, know when to take up slack on a roped steer, and
find your way back to camp while the cowboy sleeps in the saddle.
So
much for the thoroughbreds, but just because I kind of like them for
esthetic reasons of my own, what about all the cow ponies who are
actually going to do something useful, as opposed to run in circles
for people with the money and time to watch them? The vast majority
of Millennials who grew up without much attention or money in
single-parent or both-parent-working homes probably were told
regularly that they were great, wonderful kids because it didn't cost
anything, it helped to keep them (and their parents) quiet, and most
of all because boosting self-esteem was a near-religion at the time.
Meanwhile, though, the system as a whole was constructed to put those
kids in their place -- standing in the heaped up driveway, watching
the pampered thoroughbreds of the snowplow parents gallop on by, or
if they were really determined, trying to pick or kick their way
through to the cleared path. And they probably absorbed a bit of both
the self-esteem message and the not-for-you message, but quickly
learned which one to take seriously.
The
ironic joke that is not at all funny that tops all this off is that
the vast majority who were shafted at the starting gate are now being
stereotyped and blamed for the character defects of the kids who
received the fruits of the Great Shafting.
Well,
that has gone somewhat beyond Sierra's point, but if it hadn't, I
could've just posted the link. Anyway, the reactions on Sierra's
blog have been particularly predictable, which makes me feel even
better about not having comments on mine (as always, if you really
have to tell me something, shoot me an email via the link at right;
you might want to review the Ten Form Letters
first, and if you can predict which one you'll get, save yourself the
trouble). Responses to Sierra's essay sort out to:
1.
I'm a Millennial and you're right.
2.
I faced less difficulty than you did as a child, and you are a whiny
ungrateful little bitch.
3.
I am a Boomer and I need to tell you about how this article made me
feel, because everything is always all about how the Boomers feel.
4.
Of course you're an entitled little snot, and it's because you
weren't brought up eating lead paint and riding a bicycle without a
helmet. Now get off my lawn.
Now,
once again, go back to that link, click on it, and read it how Sierra
said it, because she does a better job than I'm doing here, and since
she is a Millennial, she didn't bend the message the way I did.
Meanwhile, though, I think there's a reality everyone is missing. Let
me start with a shocking thought:
Generations
don't make themselves. Events do.
For
individuals, I don't buy the idea that adversity cultivates virtue.
Virtuous people use whatever life they get to cultivate virtue; soft
lives don't necessarily make rotten people, nor hard lives good
people. Some of the nicest, most interesting, most worthwhile people
I know are humanities faculty in colleges and universities, which is
pretty much the ultimate soft job, and were trust fund babies. Some
of the most genuine scum I've known have clawed their way to the top
at some of the toughest jobs there are. The hardscrabble dirt farmer,
born behind the eight ball and never able to get out, may use all of
the little bit of spare time he has to abuse and torment every living
thing he can get his hands on, particularly his children; the
cosseted and pampered teacher's pet may, and often will, discover
that conscious gentleness and grace toward everyone makes her feel
joyful in a way that nothing else does. People construct themselves
out of their experiences, but there's a wide range of choice in what
they choose to make, and almost any experience can be the basis of a
fine person.
Generations,
however, are another matter.
First
a catch-up paragraph for those of you who have never encountered this
before: about eighty years of study of social statistics have clearly
shown that generations are a real phenomenon, that there are
occasional sudden, sharp changes in values, behaviors, interests,
etc. every 15-25 years that punctuate the stream of people being born
all the time into distinct groups, within which people are strongly
similar to their littermates.**** With survey data, marketing
research, and all the other paraphernalia we can find them and mark
them. If you're one of those people who "don't believe" in
generational effects because "everyone is individual," go
look up the work and learn something, or stay the ignorant putz you
are; it doesn't matter, as the generations will be there whether you
believe in them or not. (As Philip K. Dick pointed out, that's one of
the distinguishing characteristics of reality -- still being there
when you don't believe in it).
An
odd fact that I've seen dozens of explanations for, but never an
explanation that I really buy, is that the generational divides fall
very neatly at the points where the birth rate goes above or below
replacement. The GI generation that we call the "Greatest
Generation" in the US was born about 1908-28, all years (except
1918) when the birth rate exceeded replacement; births were below
replacement from late 1928 till early 1946, producing the Silents;
the Boomers, of course, are named for the 1946-65 demographic pig in
the python they formed; the X generation was born in the 1966-78
birth rate collapse, the Millennials in the 1978-95 echo boom, and
we've had a birth dearth most of the time since.*****
All
right, that's the generations. We hear all the time that the GI
generation now dying out in their 80s and 90s (the youngest are 84)
were the Greatest Generation, and to be honest, it's not an
undeserved designation. The oldest of them sweated out trying to get
jobs in the Depression, worked for college if they got any, and often
had to be family support for parents or younger siblings; all but the
very youngest of them were of draft age for World War II******. They
came home and achieved hitherto-unknown levels of education under the
GI Bill. GI-gens were most of the leadership of the Civil Rights
movement in the critical 1948-65 period when the nation went from
officially segregated to officially integrated. They built the ships
that went to the moon (which were flown by Silents; the Boomers
stayed home and watched on TV, of which more anon). They developed
and deployed television and computers, supplied the street forces for
the great wave of unionization and the first leaders for the revived
feminist and environmental movements, and also for the Goldwater and
Reagan conservatives ... it's quite a list. The GI Generation made
the world we live in.
They
also got a really, truly, suck-dog-awful start. And not just because
they emerged from (often too little) schooling into either the
biggest depression or the biggest war in modern times. They also had
a curiously familiar seeming upbringing: the few of them in the upper
classes were the first victims of progressive schooling (i.e make the
special snowflakes happy at the expense of teaching them) and
Freudianism (how you feel about your winkie or your shithole is Miz
Teacher's business and is very important). The overwhelming
majority of the rest got such schooling as they did in dull, rather
prison-like warehouses (though admittedly safe and quiet ones
compared to many today), pushed through standardized lessons without
particular accommodations for individuals, and mostly allowed to sink
into quiet failure before drifting out into dead-end jobs.
Does
any of that sound familiar, by any chance?
It
is pretty frequently, as in nearly always, forgotten that the
GI/"Greatest" Generation were treated with a mixture of
neglect, smothering, overindulgence and bad psychology at the top and
plain old neglect and repressive misery at the bottom. They were not
well-prepared or trained, either as leaders or as followers, and by
the late 1920s sensible people, looking at These Kids Today, were in
deep despair about them. The "rising generation is a bunch of
inept slackers who expect the world" piece was as much a staple
of Collier's or the
Saturday Evening Post
of 1928 as it is of the blogosphere today.
Then
the not-then-named generation emerged into a massive shitstorm, and
... surprise. They grew. They turned out to be bigger than it was.
They built another world to replace the one that had been torn apart,
and if enormous numbers of things were unattractive about 1993 (when
the last of them hit retirement age), it was still one big buttload
of a better time than 1926 (when the first of them graduated from
high school).
Adversity
doesn't make people, and neither does success or prosperity or ease;
that's individual. Adversity sorts a generation; presented with do or
die, some will do, some will luck out, some will die, and some will
die trying. Tough times and the shitstorms of history sort in the
doers (and the lucky) and sort out the diers (some of whom are just
unlucky, or were great people in other ways but just weren't up to
the challenges that landed on them). Adversity doesn't select
perfectly or even well, but it selects, and what is left after the
last screen is better, on the average, than what went into the
grinder.
Notice,
too, that most of the shitstorm that the GI-gens slogged through was
not of their making. They were not the ones who refused the difficult
job of peacemaking. They didn't turn the economy into a big dumb
casino, wring it dry, and leave people who had never participated in
the win to pay for the loss. They didn't dither down the road to war,
neither preparing nor peacemaking because either would have been
costly and difficult. They inherited the bitter and spoiled fruits of
all that but it was not their making.
Sound
familiar?
So
here's a contrarian forecast: the Millennials are either going to be
a great generation, or the biggest flop in history, and for once,
that's not just a matter of how it feels for them to be young
right now. That's a simple reality:
1.
They've been ill-prepared,
by an education whose purpose was neither to free them to make their
own choices (the real meaning of "liberal" education) nor
to call them to needed and necessary work (the real meaning of
"vocational" education); by the application of
psychological theories whose main purpose was the convenience and
self-gratulation of the adults around them; by having their minds and
hearts offered up to commercial interests when they were too young to
defend themselves.
2.
They will be taking the handoff for hard choices that have not been faced; the world has been loosely but
jealously held in the grip of the
All-About-Us-And-There's-No-One-Else-Here Boomers******* for twenty
years or so, and my generation have not led, have not followed, and
have not gotten out of the way. Eventually the world will have to be
pried from their grabby little fingers, grimier and more run-down,
but unfixed.
3.
Therefore: An ill-prepared but large generation that has mostly had to look
after itself, despised and worried over by its elders, is facing a
truly massive incoming shitstorm.
Sound
familiar?
What
they make of it, well, that's going to be all them. They didn't get
much help from me or any Boomer. But there's a decent chance that
around about 2070, generations yet unborn will be looking at the
Millennials and saying, "Damn! They sure were something!
How the hell are we going to get along without them?" or the
equivalent "There were giants in the earth in those days."
(That, by the way, might not make a bad science fiction setting; as the Millennials are passing from the scene, the next generation to step up might well feel some of the trepidation that the Boomers did when the GIgen started to thin out—the grownups are going away! Who's going to take care of us?)
There
is not the slightest chance anyone will feel any such thing about the
Boomers, or Gen X. The generational markers for places and events
(Woodstock, Watergate, whatever) will die with those generations; but
places and events coming in the next few years, which will have
Millennial fingerprints on them, might linger in the way that the
Bulge or Sputnik have.
Hope
you do it, guys. Sorry we weren't more help.
§
*The
biggest point Sierra misses, probably because she is not yet a
grouchy old teacher with a long experience of graduating classes, is
that nearly every
graduating student thinks his/her class is made up either of the
shining hope of humanity or the last degenerate gasp of a worthless
species; it's one of the hazards of being eighteen, as the
always-worth-reading John Cheese points out at Cracked.comThat belief is also one of the hazards of being twenty-two and
nowadays it's rather frequently a hazard of being thirty. In the
famous beginning of A
Tale of Two Cities,
Dickens is talking at least as much about youth as about revolution.
**
I think of that song as possibly the earliest emo ever; talk about
psycho-blaming!)
***
Seethis excellent forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
There are myriad ways in which education has been bent in the last
two generations so that the supposedly meritocratic academic system
of elite colleges, and the extensive preparation and testing that
supports it, has become an engine for replicating class privilege
fully as effective as the English public schools or the old Imperial
Mandarinate examinations. Note that the commenters who dismiss the
problem overwhelmingly do so because they think the hereditary caste
deserves its privileges because it does so well in school.
****Specifically,
it is much more likely that two Baby Boomers or two Silents (for
example) will share characteristics than that a mixed pair will, even
if the co-generationals are much farther apart in age than the mixed
pair; Bobby Boomer (born 1947) and Brenda Boomer (born 1961) are much
more likely to be alike in their beliefs, life narratives, values,
and so forth than Brenda is to be like Xena Xer (born 1966) or Bobby
is like Sam Silent (born 1941). Note again that these are averages
and probabilities; another privilege of not enabling comments is that
there will now not be dozens of notes from people who were born in
1955 but adore Sinatra and/or Pink. Averages, guys, averages. That's
what cultures are.
*****The
high school class of 2013 are the last Millennials, or nearly so. If
any people out there is thinking of naming the next lot "Generation
Z", I would suggest that we find those people and start stoning
them now. The About to Be Named Generation can thank us later.
******They
do not, however, have the most combat time per individual member of
the generation; that distinction belongs to the Silents, who were a
much smaller generation than the ones on either side of them, and
were the backbones of two very large wars and a host of small
brushfires between. It always seems to me that we neglect one
possible reason for why the Silents were so Silent: extremely
widespread PTSD coupled with a boom economy, so that large numbers of
the men were emotionally shattered and then all but instantly given
the traditional house/wife/job/kids complex to take care of, and did
what a stressed-out man with huge responsibilities does: shut up and
got busy. The amount of hidden pain under that will almost certainly
never be known, but a fair estimate would be "more than you can
imagine."
******Some
people will complain that since I was born in 1957, and am therefore
a Boomer, I have no business saying such things. To which I respond
that I prefer being in the Resistance to being a collaborator, and as
for my opinion of my generation, don't even try to feed me the
crap they write, film, sing, etc. about themselves; I know who the
Boomers really are. I went to high school with some of those clowns,
I went to college with more of them, I've been on many jobs with
them, and I've been listening to their shitty music since I was a
teenager. It is an eternal irritation that I can't seem to be more of
a generational traitor than I already am.
