Dear Frank Bruni: Millennials Don’t Want Your Apologies
Dear Mr. Bruni,
Along with many of my friends and colleagues, I read your recent column “Dear Millennials, We’re Sorry” with great interest. It was a welcome change from the condescension and derision that often culminates in the media branding us the “selfie generation” or the “me generation”. It’s pretty clear that if anybody is more obsessed with millennials than millennials themselves, it’s your generation. And if your column is any indication, part of that obsession comes from guilt over all the messes you have let for us to clean up.
But here’s the thing, Mr. Bruni: we don’t have time for your guilt.
As you note in your column, my generation faces some monumental challenges. The dangers of climate change are undeniable: rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms are just two of its many results that will shape the world my generation inherits. Jamestown Island in Virginia—our country’s oldest known permanent European settlement—could be underwater in less than a hundred years, according to the U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and park service officials. If that’s not a symbol of the threat our country faces, then what is? The Obama administration’s new proposals to cut carbon emissions are a good first step, but we need more.
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are also at risk because of our own actions and inaction. Government projections agree: entitlements are not sustainable at their current level. If we want the most vulnerable members of our society to have the support of these programs for decades to come, we have to get past our partisan posturing and find a way to preserve them.
Millennials don’t just face long term challenges. Many of us graduated and entered the job market in the midst of the Great Recession. And while the economic downturn hurt almost everybody, the double whammy of high unemployment numbers and skyrocketing student debt is hitting millennials particularly hard. And when companies are willing to hire us, it is often for unpaid internships, a system that perpetuates inequality and nepotism.
But enough about our problems. One of the great things about my generation is that we have both the desire and the means to meet these challenges head on. We self-identify as more focused on the environment than our parents, even though we’re worried we won’t be able to save our planet. It’s millennials who are starting many of the tech companies that are the main force for innovation in our economy right now. And we’re so fed up with the partisan gridlock in Washington that many of us are jumping ship from the lumbering behemoths of our two major political parties.
Some of us are even translating our disenchantment with politics as usual into new movements. My organization, Youth Voices, is a new political non-profit working to advance the interests of millennials generation by getting involved in local elections across the country. It will support candidates that will push for real change in issues that matter to us, like education, climate change, student debt, and intern pay. So millennials aren’t just taking selfies (although we do that, too), we’re starting organizations and companies, leading towns out of bankruptcy, and running for Congress.
Stories like these are part of a broader trend. According to a new paper from the Brookings Institution, millennials aren’t in it for the money. Instead, we want to do something we love and that will reflect our larger societal concerns. Maybe it’s a reaction to our coming of age in the middle of a huge economic crisis caused largely by unbridled greed. In any event, it’s certainly a rebuke to the notion that we’re narcissistic and don’t care about our communities.
So Mr. Bruni, we appreciate your apology, but we don’t need it. We’re ready and willing to start finding solutions to our society’s challenges ourselves. So either help us, or get out of the way.
Sincerely,
Tom Guthrie
