03-11-2022, 11:03 PM
(03-11-2022, 12:51 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Overall I'd say millennials are quite Civic. The one glaring inconsistency is that civic responsibility is all about responsibility to your country. It's not that millennials are an extremely selfish generation (this is an unfair criticism that gets levied on us, but generally, it's not true), but that they often place the greater good of the entire world above their own country and families.
The Millennial Generation (unless its cohorts extends significantly into the Double-Zero Decade)is fully adult. It cannot become anything other than Civic.OK, there has been no shooting war (unless one refers to getting shots to prevent COVID-19). This said, COVID-19 has been a new add-on of mass death, killing about one million Americans. Those resemble deaths on a scale of a land war on American territory.
I could make the case that the Millennial Generation has met a Crisis with organization and rationality. All that Millennial adults have been unusually slow at is in achieving high office, and then only because of the extended careers of the Silent and early-wave Boomers. When such people are off the scene the openings for Millennial adults will be obvious. It took until 2021 for America to fully elect its first Millennial US Senator.
Quote: The Ukraine fiasco is a good example. Like....really? Now is the time you want to go to war? At precisely the moment where it will cost your own people nothing but sacrifices with no payoff? Fighting moral crusades over gas while your own countrymen are in the worst depression in almost 100 years? Civics are supposed to support their people and their country, yet millennials walk around in perpetual guilt. I get some level of "why can't we have healthcare like Sweden?" or "Why can't we have work weeks like Australia?", but it's gotten to the point where people view their own country with shame and almost...want us to fail. I know not all of them are like this, but that such a large swathe feel this way is, at the very least, unusual for a Civic gen.
Civic generations aren't particularly war-like, but that does not mean that they won't put up a fight. They are the sorts more likely to run from a bar-room brawl...but that is what the Armed Services tell people to do. (OK, I am a Boomer, and I have run from many pointless fights in my time). Millennial adults have no role in promoting the neoliberal economic order that has made America a low-wage, high-cost country at the expense of young workers who have no stake in the graft.
Quote:On a more positive note, one thing I will say is that they seem to be finally waking up to a kind of "wholesomeness" that American culture has lost touch with since the boom, and, even into their 30s, many of the more intellectually honest ones are open minded to changing their minds and adopting values they've only come to truly understand later in life. The "red pill" community is a good example of this. It's not that everything they believe is good (some of it is kinda disgusting, and I say this as a conservative), but that it started with cringe, immature PUAs from the 2000s and gradually far America grew into a more nuanced understanding of evolutionary psychology and history that has had some more positive offshoots as well (say what you will about horny bastards desperate for sex, it's a desire that lends itself to a kind of pragmatism and adaptability stemming from necessity). Coming full circle, sbarrera made a comment about how being a hero often means being a victim who is sacrificed for the greater good. I would add to that that most heroes don't set out choosing to be heroes. They get forced into it out of necessity, and forced to develop the character and skills necessary to make it through to the other side. It could be what we're seeing is that millennials could indeed be a "heroic" generation, just one comprised of...very late bloomers.
So far America got Donald Trump as President through questionable means and rejected him through honorable means. Trump was a horrible match for Millennial values.Trump appealed to the worst in American politics and showed why electoral success by the worst invariably fails.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.