Is Everything Millennials’ Fault?…

The Today Show lines up a bunch of millennials and fires questions at them. They must raise their hands at various offenses. It’s trendy to blame a plethora of “kills” on the specific age group. Everything from golf to bar soap to vacations to wine are being declared dead; murdered by those born between the 80’s and the early 2000’s. Silly people, wine will never die.

Having birthed three millennials, I call bullshit. Yes, they are guilty of phones at the dinner table, not wearing watches and crafting life to them instead of conforming to someone else’s view. Aside from phones and wearing a watch, I taught them all of it.

I didn’t look into their perfect newborn faces and say, “I wish for you a lifetime of sitting behind a desk, bored out of your skull putting up with a crappy boss, cruddy pay and no joy until you die.” I taught them to grab what they want, love who they want, be nice to animals and people and live every moment. They’ve killed nothing. The world is evolving. For us Baby Boomers, it’s unsettling when the changing isn’t changed by or for us, non?

Millennials didn’t kill golf. Golf committed suicide and wealthy white men gave it the bullets. The old boys club dwindled when it scoffed at letting women close deals on Monday afternoons and gurgled it’s slow death when it remained unaffordable and took all day. It’s gone the way of its twin, the martini lunch. Not the martini, just the lunch.

A Grey Goose dirty, after work, with two jumbo olives, is still totally acceptable. But if you follow the millennial way of thinking, you refuse to pay twenty bucks for one cocktail so you perfect your recipe at home where you can drink in your sweat pants watching Netflix. You got a problem with that?

They claim millennials killed bar soap. Can you blame them? We taught them to be phobic of germs. And strangers, bike riding, being out of doors after dark and spending even a moment in a car not strapped in efficiently enough to blast into space. Minnesota’s Jacob Wetterling was abducted, two hours from our home, when Oldest Chicken was one. My poor child spent his life thinking we knew Jacob personally. It is my fault my child did not ride his bike with abandon miles from home like my brothers and me. My chickens rode to the country club. Yep, I was that mom.

The biggest knock millennials get, is manners. They don’t shake hands. They don’t remove their hats. They mumble. They don’t say hello. Newsflash. If your millennial has no manners, it’s ‘cuz you didn’t teach them manners. I don’t know a single young person who doesn’t shake hands, say hello and hug this old lady when we haven’t seen each other in a bit.

If my own doesn’t remove his hat, I say, “Hey, get the damn hat off your head. Where the hell do you think you are?” He may be grown but I’m not gonna stand by while he looks like an idiot. Or makes me look like I did a bad job. It’s my brand of helicopter mom.

Rudeness knows no age group. I know more Boomers who are rude, judgmental and narrow minded than any young’ins.

Next time we nod our heads in agreement that their generation is, indeed, going to hell in a hand basket and taking society with them, remember this:

“Each new generation is reared by it predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.” Emile Durkheim.