My Generation is complex...

Normally I could care less about Red Star (Star Tribune) editorials. But the"Talkin bout 'my' generation by Alexandra Petri really got me going... below is the editorial in full, below that will be my response.

Millennials don't go to rallies. ¶ Sign petitions? Please. ¶ Once we were in a protest, but only because we had to walk through it to get to a Lady Gaga concert. March for a cause? Only if "march" means "walk in a determined fashion" and "cause" means "to buy that new frozen yogurt that is so popular these days." Call us Generation I. I for irony, iPhones and the Internet. I for instant gratification. I for idiosyncratic, inventive, impertinent. We're all these things, and so are our idols -- the Onion, "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show."

That's why we're pouring onto the Mall on Saturday to celebrate the restoration of all things sane, sarcastic and Stewart. Recently, pundit Charles Murray accused us of being part of the "New Elite." Yet what binds us is not a common experience or similar genetic stock, as he claimed, but our mind-set -- a staunch and unstinting refusal to take anything seriously.

It's not that Millennials don't believe some things are serious. We'll make It Gets Better videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest. We know what happens to people who take themselves seriously. They become bent and broken with care and develop arterial plaque. Sometimes they're elected to political office. "In America, any boy may become president," Adlai Stevenson noted. "And I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes." We don't like the sound of that. Forget the years in which people in sweater-sets earnestly pushed toward the front of the class. These days, the whole class wants to sit in the back row and lob spitballs. After someone discovered the mystical secret of doing things ironically, we felt a great weight lift from our shoulders. Now, we dwell in thickets of inverted commas. Want us to come to a rally? Better make it a "rally." Want us to testify before Congress? Only if we can do it in character. Someone more cynical than I might say our salient characteristic can be reduced to an overwhelming desire to avoid looking silly. But there's more to it than that.

As a Millennial, my greatest fear is that someday I might accidentally say something that offends someone. I am so aware of this that the only group I feel safe writing vaguely offensive generalizations about is illiterate people. (If you are reading this aloud to an illiterate friend, please, stop two sentences ago!) That's the unforgivable sin in our book. Affairs? We'll cope. Addictions? Sure. But say something earnestly racist, homophobic or misogynistic, and watch everyone's affection evaporate. "I'm just quoting Mel Gibson," you scream. But it's too late. Throw quotations around it, however, and everyone heaves a sigh of relief. That's how satire has risen to the top of the food chain. Millennials give comics the kind of adulation past generations reserved for musicians. We respect Lady Gaga. But we'll travel hundreds of miles to touch the hem of Jon Stewart's robe. That's why my demographic is coming, en masse, to Washington for the Stewart-Colbert rally. More than 200,000 have RSVP'd on Facebook (almost as many as have registered to vote). You may have heard a Millennial say, "Ah, I'm not voting this year." But have you ever heard one say, "That Jon Stewart guy is not funny at all"? Never. The Earth might explode! Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

To Generation I, for whom life exists so we can put as many things as possible in quotes, this "rally" is the closest we will ever get to a love-in. It's a "like-in." For Millennials -- wearing properly supportive bras, which they will not burn, and carrying reasonable signs -- it's the ultimate antiprotest. Still, there's a nervous frisson of truthiness behind all this. The Post recently quoted a media professor saying of Stewart, "He's a progressive, but his bias is towards reasonableness." When it comes to opinions, that's about as far as any of us can go. We're clinging to our satire as we've heard some people cling to their guns and religion. The problem is that great ages of satire are seldom great ages of, well, anything else.

Ok wow where to begin...

I am stuck with my millenial generation whether or not I like it. I look at my generation the way I imagine people growing up in the 1960's looked at the idiots going to Woodstock and thinking, wait these people are going to be involved in running this country 10 or 20 years from now?! Were DOOMED! But they "normalized" and became part of society but will we? I am not convinced that some of my generation will, they care too much about reality tv, celebrities and who they are screwing and why, and Facebook (I say this as a Facebook addict since 2005 myself).
I am proud to say that I went to Tea Party rallies back in April 2009 and 2010. No, I didn't dress up in colonial garb but I did feel refreshed that some people on the right side of the political spectrum finally cared enough to show up and voice their concerns. I was very discouraged after the 2008 elections. "Hope and Change" "Yes we Can!" I never bought any of that shit. I actually listened to what Obama was saying and who he hung out with (Billy Ayers and Rev. Wright) because I remember the old Chinese proverb: you can tell the character of a man by the company he keeps. And the company he kept didn't concern me, it scared the ever living shit out of me. But debating with kids my age was useless. They just didn't care, and they still don't which is frieghtening. Obama and company are selling, or should I say spending, our futures in some deluded Keynesian fantasyland to get us out of the recession we now see us in.
As a Millenial my greatest fear is not offending someone. I have been called a racist, homophobe, intolerant, etc, so many times that the words have lost all meaning to me. They are thrown around by the Left so much that anyone called that just laughs in thier faces now, because they cannot debate which is sad. I love debating and even when it gets heated I still get enjoyment out of it. My concern is is that by the time my generation wakes up to what is going on it will be too late. College graduates are having trouble finding jobs because they are applying along with millions of laid off workers that have experience. Unemployment among 16-24 year olds was at 19.1% and that was in July! No wonder a lot of kids are moving back home after they graduate. The one good thing I can say is that at least were not France. Imagine kids protesting the raising of the age at which you can get social security benefits, because I cannot. I think our generation is at least smart enough to recognize that by the time they retire Social Security will be a distant memory, something our elders had and frittered away because they liked raiding it for their special pet projects. And I'm not just blaming Democrats on this one, Republicans are just as much to blame.
I watch Stewart and Colbert and I do enjoy their shows but their views on things are so clearly slanted but I recognize that. Do other kids? They are being unintenionally indoctrinated and thinking that Colbert is the sterotypical Republican (even if I do kind of agree with him on some things) and not a caricture of many different (ok maybe mainly Bill O'Rielly) personalities. I listen to talk radio, I watch Fox News too so I get the opposite ends of the spectrum. I try to watch MSNBC but can't, its just too vicious. I do watch CNN sometimes because they have toned it down and are fair. And Fox News is a lot more fair than people give it credit for, people get into big verbal fistfights on there and it is fun and educational.
The election on Tuesday will be the most important in my lifetime, I mean that as in there will never (probably) be another election this important as long as I live. My message to my generation is, stay home, get high and watch The Daily Show. Leave voting to those who know what's at stake since you clearly don't.