THIS. This with this sauce, wrapped in a this tortilla:
For most Americans under 40, life since 2008 has been a struggle to survive. But it is worth noting that plenty of older Americans share the same struggles as their younger peers. Many older people laid off in the recession were unable to regain good jobs. There are plenty of older people with few retirement savings, with their finances drained from paying for both elderly parents and jobless children. We need to acknowledge the way our struggles are intertwined, instead of allowing the media to stoke manufactured class and generational resentment.
Forget “the media” stoking manufactured generational resentment. Let’s not allow OUR BOSSES to stoke manufactured generational resentment. I swear the millennial hate makes me so insane because I remember being 23 and new in a job, and having to listen to people imply I was a) just there because I’d work cheap and b) hopelessly dumb.
I wanted to be there, working for hey guess what anything I could get, and I wanted to learn, and I had no idea who had held my job before me, and how the hell I was supposed to be responsible for if they were older than me and got laid off. Like how would I know that? And what was I supposed to do, like should I not eat, because the bosses were jerkwads?
Should I have found someplace where only 23 year olds worked, so that I wasn’t taking a job ever held by anyone older than me?
You know who wins when we let that kind of generational sniping happen? The people who profit from it. If you can make the employees fight maybe they won’t notice you stealing all the money. This is the same bullshit argument that gets people mad at people in other countries for “taking American jobs” instead of mad at corporate executives for “giving jobs away in order to make a buck.”
I work on a regular basis with lots and lots of millennials, and about eight of them I wouldn’t throw a rope to if they were drowning. The other 11,000 over the past decade have been working two jobs or three to make ends meet and will still stay up all night trying to solve a problem they’ve been given, and I’d like them on my side in any fight at all. I don’t get the man bun thing, but that’s not an actual problem. Plus I grew up in the late 80s and I cannot believe anyone had sex with us looking like that.
Maybe assignment editors know too many rich kids, who are prone to be assholes not because they’re kids but because they have no needs that anyone serious cares about. The trend pieces about kids sleeping in the library or their cars while trying to go to college and figure out how to make it out of their post-industrial craphole towns with their sanity intact. But that doesn’t get the sitemeters spinning quite the same way, does it?
A.