Proving That The Millennials Are Brilliant

THE MILLENNIALS WERE BORN between 1982 and 2000, and the generation being born now, between 2000 and 2018 must have its own name by now, whatever it is. A book called "The Dumbest Generation", published in 2009, talks about the millennials, which reads like the traditional panic among the older generations concerning the quality of the new ones, a fun little game humans have been playing since, oh, when.... time immemorial? Must be something in our genes, or the water. Doom is always on the horizon, and its always embodied in the "next" generation. I spend about half my time on a big college campus, and about a fourth of it at the senior center, which gives me an interesting perspective. Just the other day my older sister was remarking how rude the millennials seem to be, and I countered that the senior senior citizens didn't always come up short in the rude department, themselves. I pointed out that today's senior citizens, for the most part, were either teenagers in the fifties, or baby boomers, and that neither group, particularly in its own day, acquitted itself very well in the lack of rudeness department. Particularly spoiled generations, I'd say, what with the post world war two American prosperity and the avalanche of material wealth bestowed upon the children of the fifties and sixties. The only reasonable conclusion is that generation after generation, over the thousands of years of human history, the levels of civility and incivility within any given civilization has waxed and waned a bit, but has always tended to remain within the main part of the bell curve distribution. Then too, of course, standards of behavior change. But now that I think about it, all the time I've spent on a college campus lately, and all the thousands of millennials I've seen, I have never seen any of them reading a book, even once, I have never seen one walking on campus without staring at a smart phone, and I have never seen any one of them walk into anything, incredibly. that proves it; they're brilliant.