The Generation That Sleeps

I hear all the time many negative adjectives atributed to my generation.  They range from entitled to lazy to uncaring.  First of all, it seems a little insane to assign attributes to an entire generation of people who come from such varied backgrounds that such stereotypes could not possibly be true.  Furthermore, I think that these generalizations are grossly unfounded.

First of all, they tell us all the time we are entitled.  I am not sure what they really even means to be honest...Does that mean we want to be paid well for work we do?  Oh gosh darn it, workers want to be paid appropriately for their work?  Is this not what union activists fought for in the 19th century?  Do we not come form a long legacy of workers constantly fighting for a better portion of their labor's productivity?  Perhaps entitled means we expect that if we do what society tells us to do we should get what society tells us we should have gotten.  For instance, most of us are told from birth that if we go to college we will end up with a good job.  While life has taught me that this is invariably untrue, it is still told to us in a variety of ways.  Does it make us entitled to want reality to reflect what we have been instructed reality is?

People say that our generation is lazy and that we do not work hard.  How many truely lazy people do you know?  I know we are typified as wanting to do nothing at all and just engage in leisure activity.  However, could it possibly be that we want to both work hard AND have time to enjoy the fruits of our labor?  I think it is indeed possible for us to want to work and to work hard, but at the same time put forth a lot of effort at enjoying life in the way we want to.  As Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid would say (and I paraphrase), "life is about finding balance."  Maybe we do not want to work 65 hours a week doing a shitty job to start of with when we've been engaging in meaningful life experiences the first twenty years of our life.  I theorize that my generation is seeing the brutal inequality of the economic rewards of the system and refuse to engage in it full scale on moral grounds.

Finally people say that our generation does not care, that we are not moved to great social action.  However, the Wall Street Protests, as brief as they were, should have shown that we are willing to engage in protests.  However, I think that much more subtlely than that my generation IS in fact engaging in large-scale social change.  We are indeed engaged in the dialogue but instead of through the normal channels of previous generations we are making our own mark in the world through the internet.  We are the generation trying to figure out how in fact to harness this strange and ambiguous technology to create greater social good.  For instance, downloading music on the internet.  People committing acts of crime or clamoring to be heard that economic inequality prevents them from paying the bloated prices the music industry's profits demand?  I would imagine that the same people who downloaded music illegally would have been more than willing to pay some portion of money straight to the artist as an alternative, but it was an alternative that did not yet exist.  Refusal to pay for copyrighted material is indeed a form of social activism and protest.  We are just being led to believe it is in fact not when in reality it is.