The Big Lie
or, millennials are killing this episode.
Note: This essay is part of the PeteBrownSays podcast, season 2, episode 8: The Big Lie.
There’s a running joke I do on the show where I may be talking about something from my past, like, say, Blockbuster Video or rotary phones, and then I pause and explain to my millennial listeners what those things are. It’s not because I have a lot of Millenial listeners, nor — as I see now that I write it down — that it’s a particularly funny bit. But each time I do it, I’m pausing to point out just how much has changed in the way we communicate, in the ways we entertain ourselves, in the way we live now.
We don’t have a landline in our house anymore. Haven’t for years. Of course, there’s a big old phone jack — which is what landlines plug into — halfway up the wall in our kitchen. I tried hanging a picture over it for a while but it never looked right. Then I put a couple of miniature plastic dinosaurs on it. Not only did that not help, it made my wife angry. So finally, I went onto eBay and bought an old, nonfunctioning wall-mounted rotary phone in avocado green and stuck it up there. And it looks great.
“Does that work?” my kids asked when they saw it.
“Sure!” I said. “I can call Santa with it.”
I’m not sure why I said that. My kids were 15 and 17 at the time. Calling Santa no longer held any power over them.
“Dad, really?” my daughter asked. “Do you think infants?”
“Well, I guess Santa should like to know that you’re not,” I replied, picking up the receiver and dialing.
In later days, I also inexplicably told my kids that I could also call Jesus. We’re not a particularly religious crew, so I’m not sure why I chose Jesus as the second phone call recipient, but then my wife shouted from the other room:
“Tell him we’re out of wine.”
Ahh. That’s why.
Still, whenever the kids were about and driving me cray-cray, I’d pick up the receiver and make a report to SantaJesus, a joke which irritated them to no end.
Until the one time I ended a pretend call by saying “Talk to you later, Chief” and for reasons I still can’t quite explain, my kids both burst out laughing. My son bounded up to the phone, picked it up, said a few words, then hung up and said to me “Chief says that ain’t it.”
As it turns out, I had stumbled into a meme. Stumbling is the only way I can get into memes, by the way. They just weren’t made for Gen-X brains to comprehend.
The chief meme, I learned, was relatively new — appearing in the urban dictionary this past July. The website Know Your Meme tells me:
This Ain’t It, Chief is a slang phrase used in forums as a way to tell the poster that the thing they posted isn’t as cool as they think. The phrase is used in a similar friendly-but-insulting way as Imma Keep It Real With U Chief.
It feels to me like it’s an update to the Cool story, bro meme, which is something you can say to someone who’s shared one of those stories with you that kind of starts to fall apart as the teller realizes, in the middle of telling it, that it’s probably not such a great story after all. Like this one. Cool story, bro.
In any case, I was thrilled that the kiddos had added to the mythology of our house and our avocado rotary phone that can now be used to call Santa, Jesus or Chief, if your keeping track. I was thrilled to have a fleeting moment of connection with my kids, who grow further away from each day, leaving me to parse through my worries and wonder if I’ve done a remotely passable job of preparing them for the paths that lie ahead. That’s the kind of thing you worry about when you’re approaching 50 and your kids aren’t infants and Santa and Jesus hold no sway.
In any case, I can see now that I’ve written it down that this running gag of explaining things to my Millenial listeners probably isn’t as funny as I thought it was, nor does it really serve much purpose in the overall story of any episode where I’ve done it. Were this podcast a forum post, I can only imagine the rush to highlight and copy the instances of the joke into a reply post under one concise sentence: This ain’t it, Chief.
Alas. It ain’t.
I want to get back to my Millenial friends, though, because they are deservedly at the heart of today’s narrative. Yes, I’ve subtitled this episode Millenials are Killing This Episode just as a way to refer to dearth of things Millenials have been accused of killing on the internet, everything from breakfast cereal to divorce to car ownership. Just google Millenials are killing… and see what comes up. It’s nuts.
But before I can get into the tidal wave of things Millenials are killing, I need to start, as I usually do, back in the middle of the 1980s. Back when people were worried about drugs, which are something that can make you feel pretty good, but are ultimately pretty bad for you. This relationship was captured in an anti-drug campaign back in the 80s called The Big Lie.
Big Lie excerpt.
By the way, Millenials are killing cocaine. Or was it Coca Cola? Rest assured, it’s one of them.
But today I’m writing about a different, but no less big, lie. And it’s one you can hear repeatedly if you watch talking-head shows on the news networks or listen to political talk radio in any form. If you watch these shows, invariably, a grouchy old white guy (or, possibly, that jackwagon Dinesh D’Souza) will show up to say something like “America’s problem is that everybody gets a trophy.”
That’s two words there, a (the article), then a space, then trophy (the award). Say it fast enough and it sounds like “America gets atrophy,” atrophy meaning a decline in effectiveness due to lack of use, which, arguably, is a way more accurate summary of our state of affairs than their actual intended meaning, which seems to be that participation trophies are the root of all evil and everything that’s wrong with this country nowadays.
Invariably, the grouchy old white dude (or that moron D’Souza) is talking about Millenials, whom he’ll likely also call “snowflakes,” a term used derogatorily to refer to this idea that, for their entire lives, they have been told that they are unique. The knock that these old guys seem to have against Millenials is that they, the millennials, I mean, need repeated positive reinforcement because that’s what they’ve gotten their whole lives. Search the exact phrase “Everybody gets a trophy” and Google will serve up close to 30,000 results. Even the Simpsons jumped on board to parody this back in season 28:
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the grouches calling radio talk shows to share these sentiments have never actually have worked with any Millenials. Because these sentiments they share, in my experience of working with and managing Millenials at several different stops in my career, are simply not true. Not even close.
In the day-to-day life of modern work, any one person’s value and accomplishment and need for feedback varies based on who they are, what their job is, how they like to do it and who’s managing them. I’ve never noted a generational pattern to these things. Instead, the measure is of the man, or woman, as it were.
I’m not an easy boss to work for; believe me: feedback from me is typically brief and direct, by which I mean I often forget to highlight the positive before getting to the changes I’d like to see. But I hire bright, self-sufficient and talented people, and thus I get bright and excellent results from hard-working, self-sufficient, talented people.
This snowflake thing is a broad brush that unfairly paints an entire generation. It’s kind of like saying all old white guys are grouchy and support Trump. It feels true, but really, it can’t be 100%, right?
And yet incredibly, this is not the Big Lie I’m talking about today. The lie I am talking about is one I discovered as I began to notice that more and more of the grouchy old guys, including (I’m sorry to once again note) the jackwagon D’souza, disparaging the Millenial generation’s wealth of trophies are not Baby Boomers or Greatest Generationers, but rather from Generation X: my people.
And every Gen-X listener I have is right now cluing in to what the Big Lie is. Some may be nervous that I’m about to say it out loud, to lay it bare for all the world to see, but the truth must out, Xers. And that truth is this:
We all got a trophy too. Tons of them. We were the original everyone gets a trophy generation. We fucking invented the Certificate of Participation. Why are these old grouchy dudes so mad anyway? Because they see themselves in the thing they’re railing against. #truthbomb #psychology101yo!
How do I know?
I know because I have them all, in a box that was in my parent’s basement for years. 1979 West Shore Y “Flag” football reads one, with the word flag for some reason in quotes. Cub Scout Pinewood Derby reads another.
Now: did I get a trophy for every youth sport season or activity I participated in?
No. Not always, whereas today, I’m pretty sure my Gen-Z kids got a trophy for everything. But this slight discrepancy is not the point. The point is this:
Who was giving us Gen-Xers these awards while we were growing up? Hmm? Our parents. Our motherfucking Baby Boomer parents, the same motherfuckers who fucked up the environment and now seem to be spending their retirement calling talk radio shows to complain about their grandkids.
Think about it for a second.
Now, I’m unique among Gen-Xers in that my Dad was a WWII vet of the so-called Greatest Generation. I share with the Boomers what it’s like to have parents who are simply glad they survived the war and avoided another great depression, and given those two facts, pretty much handed parenting off to their kids themselves. Did I get much praise or hands-on parenting from Dad? Absolutely not, and many boomers will tell you the same. That’s just how it was.
So when I became a parent, did I think about how I was parented and make some decisions about doing things differently? Hell’s yeah, I did. And if you’re a parent, you probably did too. Just like all those those boomers who became parents and oversaw unprecedented explosions in things like organized youth sports and activities, for which they began giving out trophies to everyone on the team.
And if we didn’t get a trophy, what happened?
Xers know: We got a certificate of participation. Yeah, we did. Those useless sheets of paper signed by a coach or a teacher or a den mother? I have reams of them.
So what happened?
Technology frickin’ happened.
When I started grade school, most of my teachers made copies of their worksheets using a mimeograph, this weird machine set back deep in the smoky teacher’s lounge. It had a hand crank, and the teacher had to turn it manually one rotation for each copy, which was printed in a uniquely scented purple ink that many of us huffed up as soon as the sheets were passed out.
Halfway through grade school, our school acquired a computer, an Apple II, which sat on a cart outside Sister Ardath’s office. We would go down a class at a time to sit on the floor around it while she told us what it could do.
And by 8th grade? We had a Computer Lab with a handful of Apple IIs that we were allowed to use, and we carried our own floppy disks to it for our weekly session. For some reason, my grade school wanted us to learn to type by using a typing tutor program that was on there, but I would speed through those lessons so I would have some time to mess around with what the true game-changer was: Print Shop!
Or more specifically, The Print Shop, a sort of Precambrian graphics program first released in 1984 that you could use to make your own greeting cards or banners or, yes — certificates of participation. Sure, these things were printed on dot matrix printers that took forever and when they were done you had to tear off these perforated edges that the printer used to pull paper through itself.
It sounds awful, compared to today’s technology. But compared to using a typewriter and carbon paper and god-damned mimeograph machine? It was like we had caught up to the Jetsons, at least on the homemade greeting card front. So yeah, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the arrival of Print Shop was paired with an explosion in Certificates of Participation.
And the easier it got to make them, the more of them we got. At the year-end assembly after 9th grade (I had switched schools by then, and went to the public Junior High down the street from our house for 9th grade), the Athletic Director called every kid in the whole school whoever had participated in any sport at any point over the past three years up on stage at the auditorium, then told the crowd what sport they had done, and then forked over a certificate of participation for each and every season in each and every sport, which, by the way, was in addition to the certificates of participation that our coaches had given us at the season-end banquet/potlucks we had. This dang assembly took forever, and by the end, about 90 percent of the kids were on the stage looking out at a handful of exhausted teachers and about 11 kids who were starting to clue into what the word polarization means.
And yes, it took a while for acquiring actual plastic trophies to become as easy as printing out a participation certificate, but we’ve certainly arrived there, have we not? I just hopped on Amazon where I learned that I can get a set of 12, 6-inch trophies delivered to me this same afternoon for 12 bucks. Need more proof? At some time over the past few years, we started giving out medals to everyone who runs a 5K. That’s medals to adults, yo. Grown-ass men and women. For a 5 freaking K.
And let me be clear: I’m not here to say this is a good or bad practice. If anything, I’d classify it as more or less mundane anymore. But I am here to say that the people complaining about it are the same ones who started it. And this suggests to me that the desire to reward our children is more or less constant across the past few generations. And the easier and more feasible it became to make these awards, the more often we do it.
I’m not sure how these grouchy old guys can’t see this, or, if they can see it, don’t seem to blanch at the alternative narrative…which, if I’m puzzling out the logic correctly, would be that we just love our kids more than their parents loved them. I guess I can see, at least, why that would make a person feel some anger. Of course, if this were true, maybe the correct narrative is just their parents didn’t love them enough to give them trophies because they’re kind of assholes. I mean, nothing they are going on TV to say suggests otherwise to me.
It’s patently ridiculous, of course. I mean, with the possible exception of Dinesh D’Souza, nobody is born an actual asshole. But I find whenever you dig in to talking-head-on-TV logic, you find yourself in some ridiculous places pretty quickly.
I put in my time coaching youth athletics. I tried to get it all in before my kids turned 6. Which means I coached a few seasons of U5 soccer and a few seasons of T-ball.
Why this self-imposed term limit? Because after U5 is when we start keeping score in our soccer and t-ball leagues. And while I was an OK coach, I had an instinctive feeling that it’d be best for me to punch the clock before the stakes at these games got raised, even if it was only after one year of scorekeepingless ball.
The fact that we didn’t keep score for a total of one season of our kid’s soccer and t-ball careers still didn’t prevent a disgruntled parent from complaining to me about it.
“Hey coach,” he said. “How the hell will our kids learn if we don’t keep score.”
Me: “Ummmm.”
Him: “When are they gonna learn what winning and losing are all about?”
Me: When they’re six. So, next year?
Him: “This is what’s wrong with our country.”
Me: Is it?
Him: “I don’t care what you do, but I’m gonna keep score.”
Me: “Knock yourself out, Chief.”
This was U5 Tee Ball, by the way, where just about every kid batted every inning and the last batter got to run all the way around the bases, resulting in a lot of 40–40 ties, as I’m sure this parent’s scorekeeping revealed. Lucky for him, his kid would go on to indeed turn six, and play in a league that kept score, and, presumably, end his childhood.
Also, as a quick aside to any prospective, aspiring coaches out there: in my first coaching gig, I put out a snack schedule. Then one of the parents asked if they could do the snack on a different date. So I put out a revised snack schedule. And then it is no overstatement to say that all manner of fucking hell broke loose, and just trust me on this, never, ever fuck with the snack schedule.
So in my experience coaching my kids, scorekeeping started at age 6, which seems early enough to me. Kids learn quickly that losing feels lousy and winning feels great, and that no participation trophy is ever going to change that. The award itself is not to say “Hey! You did great!” It’s to say “Hey! You put yourself out there and did something hard! Good on you!”
My kids and my wife took Tae Kwon Doe for a long time, five or six years, it seems to me, and all three became Black Belts before it was said and done. And of all the youth sports my kids participated in, TKD is the one that had, it seemed to me, the most accountability built into it. To move up a belt, you have to do three things: learn a form — a series of moves specific to the belt they’re going for — and perform it without mistake in front of a panel of judges, successfully spar other students for three rounds, and break a series of wooden boards using specific kicks and punches prescribed for each level.
I watched the three of them test dozens of times. And like most of the students, they often had learned and performed their forms well, they sparred to the satisfaction of the judges, and so it all came down to the wood they had to break. It was simple math at this point: you had three chances to break each board. Break the wood, you passed. Don’t break it, you don’t.
That’s simple accountability. Those grouchy old dudes would love it.
The wood breaking portion of each testing event is also the most dramatic for the parents watching. Especially when they announce a kid is on his or her third attempt. All of us in the crowd hold our breath and think “god damn’t let that kid break that fucking wood.”
Sometimes she did. Sometimes he did not.
If you didn’t break your wood, despite your disappointment, when the testing was over, you go to the back of the room where a teacher worked with you until you broke the wood. In other words, you never left the event without having broken the wood, whether or not you passed or not.
So yeah, if it sounds like I’m talking up TKD as a great way to teach accountability, I am. But in the interest of fairness, I also have to tell you about the spirit awards.
Yeah, the spirit awards. Because here’s the other thing about Tae Kwon Doe — every few months, you participated in tournaments against other schools. It was a whole other level of accountability, a way to really put what you’ve learned to the test. And in these tournaments, you competed in a ring with 5–7 other students, and you could place 1st, 2nd or 3rd in forms or in sparring. And if you failed to place in either? You got a spirit award.
Spirit Awards are medals, just like the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place medals, only they say Spirit Award on them. The idea behind them is pretty simple: it’s takes a certain amount of gumption to get up and compete against students from other schools. To put your form on the line against theirs. To spar them directly in scored rounds.
You know what’s easier for kids than doing that? Literally everything in their lives. Like doing nothing! Doing nothing is so freaking easy that yeah, you’ve gotta have a little bit of spirit to get up and do something, like try to kick some kid from Indiana in the head for three minutes.
We have a ton of these spirit awards at our house. Both my kids and my wife picked up handfuls of them over the years. And if you think the spirit award is supposed to tell a kid they did awesome, you’re not seeing the point here. The spirit award is not to tell you that you did great when obviously other kids had done better. It’s there to say that between doing nothing and trying to do something hard, you chose the latter. And that takes some spirit.
And there is this: kids hate spirit awards. I think the adults do too, but I know for sure that kids hate them. I’d watch how both of my kids would keep their heads down, eyes at the ground when the judges bestowed them. How they’d rush over to me as soon as the awards ceremony was over and rip it off their necks like it was silver and they were vampires and hand it to me in a rush and say put this away.
My son asked me once if we could melt all of his down using the grill out back.
“We could try,” I said. “What do you want to make with the metal?”
“Ingots,” he said.
“What are ingots?” I asked.
“They’re what you make when you melt down metal,” he explained.
“Oh,” I said.
We never got around to melting down his spirit awards, by the way. It’s just not something you can do on a whim.
And before I set youth sports down, here, I’d say that the one big difference I’ve noticed between my day and today’s has to do with cuts.
Now, cuts still do happen, but it seems to me like they happen much later on. But where I had the opportunity to try out for one travel soccer team (and if you listened to Episode 5 from last season: I become that parent) you know that I tried out and was cut 4 times before I made it, today the kids have options when it comes to select or travel sports. There are multiple travel teams for each sport, and if you really want to elevate your game to another level, you can find a team that will help you do that.
The last difference I want to comment on, and yes, I am painting with a broad brush here, is that Millenials are arguably the first generation of kids whom we taught to ask for they want. That’s it! And we taught them that because the shitty world of unwritten rules that we were raised in often had us not asking for what we wanted, because our Dads won a war and our Grandmas lived through the depression. My Grandma was born in Croatia in 1899, and when she babysat us growing up, I’d ask her for some money so I could go to Minotti’s and buy a pack of baseball cards or a candy bar, and she’d give me a nickel. Every time. And she wouldn’t hear arguments about how much things actually cost back then.
So yeah, I’ve taught my kids to ask for what they want. And sure, it is irritating sometimes. But it’s an irritation borne of deep-seeded jealousy, because we never had such freedom of request. But there’s an important flip-side to having raised a generation of kids who know how to ask for what they want, and that’s what you can say No and they’re cool with it. We naturally don’t want to say no, because of the ways those No’s shut us down in the 70’s and 80’s and made us want to do things like drugs. But today’s kids, they roll with the no. Because that’s how transactions based on yes-no questions are supposed to fucking work.
So what is going on with the complainers who seek every opportunity to throw the millennials under the bus? I mean, what’s it to you if millennials have it so easy, as they claim, if they’re so entitled? What’s the skin off your back?
And yes, I think deep down there’s jealousy at the heart of the matter, though I doubt they could ever bring themselves to admit it. There’s a fear that it may be true that today’s kids are more loved than they were. But the kicker, the straw that breaks the camel’s back and gets them to pick up their landline phones and dial the station’s number is that they feel threatened. Threatened with a loss of relevance. That the world is changing significantly from the world they knew, the world they thought they built. And I get that. I feel it too, if you want to know the truth, whenever I have to ask my kids how to do something on Instagram or Snapchat and they laugh at me.
But all of that shit is about the complainer, and not about our bright, capable and emboldened next generation. When someone is complaining about millennials, it’s because there’s something in themselves that feels wounded and broken, and rather than own up to that, rather than digging in and exploring it and processing it and, you know, growing as a person, it’s just a hell of a lot easier to complain that the snowflakes are all getting trophies.
And the truth is, that ain’t it, Chief.
