By David Himmel

The Millennial Generation is unlike any other American generation before, which is exactly why America has a fighting chance of making it through the next century.

Stereotypes and magazine stories and old people will say Millennials — those born between 1980 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — are entitled and lazy and self-absorbed. And some are. And you know how they got that way? Their parents, the previous generation. The idiom, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” holds true always, but specifically when put against our generations’ behaviors.

Many Millennials did not dive into the workforce of their fathers, mothers and grandparents right after college because there was no workforce. Many older Millennials emerged from their universities the way cicadas might emerge from the ground ready to feed on a tree that had since been chopped down for firewood. Prior generations had broken the damn thing, stripping the once abundant opportunity of an American workforce away.

Seeing the fickleness of American Capitalism, these Millennials chose not to run onto the burning ship made of popsicle sticks. They had no interest in being house poor and boat rich, but forging their own path and redefining what it meant to be an American Capitalist. Something more altruistic. Something more viable and socially sustainable. Which is why every damn thing we all do now is public knowledge or shared. Rides, pics, vids, magnificently uninformed opinions, alternative facts…

Millennials have a sense of bright hope for the future, which is something that’s hard for a guy like me to swallow or even get behind sometimes. I’m not cut of that cloth. My only slightly younger peers — I was born at the ass end of Generation X — have led the charge on pushing liberal extremism maniacally close to right wing fanaticism. I say we’ve become too P.C., that Social Justice Warriors are inflicting more harm than good. Out of this effort to beat back those who would oppress liberal views, the liberal view has been fractured into sects, each one trying to prevent the other from saying, showing or doing something. But every great change needs its growing pains, and I hope that this is just that. Hopefully, the worst of the SJWs will tire out and die off and we’ll land on some reasonable ground where every physical or emotional description or joke is not an insult.

If we can get through these highly-offended times, we’ll be on our way to a true place of post-racism, sexism, elitism and gross economic disparity. It’ll continue to be a slog but the attitude which fuels the slog is righteous.

Millennials don’t want to be their parents. They’re just like Generation X was before Generation X hit 30 and totally sold out, which is exactly the way the Baby Boomers were. The Flower Children were the same people who elected Reagan — twice. Millennials won’t sell out at 30. Many of them have already hit that mark and continue to reimagine, or re-purify even, American values, American pride, and generally, the American Way. It’s not a boot up someone’s ass as Toby Keith so stated in 2002 with the pride of a rage-fueled Cro-Magnon.

Today’s world moves faster than ever before and Millennials meet that speed better than Gen Xers ever could. We weren’t as blindly proud as the Greatest Generation or as entitled and evil as the Baby Boomers, we were lazy and slow, and saw that as a act of righteousness. Rebellion without action was the cause of Generation X. Maybe things would have been different if Cobain had lived. Hell, maybe the Boomers would have been a better generation if Lennon had lived.

Things are different now, really different for the first time in our history. A 9–5 job is not the path to financial success. Being married with three kids by the time you’re 30 is not the path to a happy heart. A college education is hardly worth its value compared to the irrational cost it incurs and the diminishing results it brings. The environment is not the vast toilet mom and dad seemed to think it is.

American history repeats itself and repeats and repeats itself with only slight differences between the generations. The time in which Millennials live in and are defining, is unlike the others. With the architects of modern America — the Greatest Generation — fading away, and the destructors of the empire — the Baby Boomers — not far behind, now is the time for action and a great shift. It’ll be an ontological shift that we won’t notice until it has already occurred, and it will be the Millennials who will get us there.

It’s just too bad their music sucks. Imagine Dragons? Lorde? Chainsmokers? Fucking Macklemore? Jesus…

Bonus Content