With My Generation It's Like This...

The older generation has one thing right about mine: they don’t understand us. They say that we are lazy and disrespectful in the workplace, expecting too much, but I have to strongly disagree. There are many things that Generation Y has been raised around that no other generation can understand, yet the older generations are becoming bitter instead of listening and trying to understand. This reaction is to be expected because that’s the way it has always been.

I went home this weekend and discussed my generation with my family, and what they told me came as a surprise: their parents had said the same things about them. My dad once told me that his parents (who are Pentecostal preachers) hated his rock music, just like my mom hates my rap music. Look at the movie Footloose, they weren’t allowed to dance because it was considered evil. In biblical times children were stoned for any disobedience. Every generation is different from the next, and to be honest I believe that it is the fact that older people don’t understand younger ideas that is causing the uproar.

60 Minutes stated that The Millenials are lazy. Every generation has lazy individuals, and my generation is no exception. This being said, I don’t believe that we are all lazy. I believe that we are just so used to a fast paced response to our requests and problems that we are seen as lazy. When I think about it, I had a form of LeapFrog when I was 5 and a cell phnoe in middle school. My mom and I shared our first phone plan together. I have the laptop that I am typing this on for college and my own credit card. My parents didn’t even have seatbelts growing up. My mom told me that she debated whether seatbelts or airbags should be in cars. Oh how the times have changed.

It was also mentioned in the 60 Minutes recording that we were told that we were special at an early age, and a lot of us were. I guess I don’t understand when being encouraged became a bad thing. Just because you didn’t win a ball game, doesn’t mean you aren’t a winner. When I was in first grade I threw some of my papers away because they “weren’t good enough grades”. It turns out that my teacher was my next door neighbor and gave the papers to my mom. My mom had to have a long talk with me about how an A- was a good grade and to be proud of it. To an extent I think elementary and high school teachers did me a disservice by telling me that a C was okay. Even though I never listened to them, other kids did. So how is giving the last place team a metal worse that telling a kid that achieving mediocrity is acceptable? How can our elders say that we are a generation that will accomplish nothing when they taught us not to achieve?

I believe that my generation is full of potential, and we will surprise many with what we accomplish. We are highly underestimated, yet we will show everyone what we are really made of. Look at our high school and college graduate level; it’s much higher than in the past. My elders need to give us a chance. Since this isn’t very likely, I think that a lot of people will be eating their words in the future, and that’s okay. I just hope not too many of my peers let their criticism get to them before then.