Dear Millennials,
You’ve been on my mind lately—a lot. Maybe it’s because my
child is one of you. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time with
many of you. Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking a lot about you.
I get angry when I hear some of the stereotypes about your
generation. I don’t envy your position. You’re inheriting one hell of a messy
world, and I think it’s unfair for people to measure you against what earlier
generations were doing at your age.
The world today is nothing like it was decades ago. I
remember my best friend growing up. She married her high school sweetheart, and
in 1987, when he was 25 and she was 21, they had four children, owned two
houses and two cars. And they did all of this on only his income. She stayed
home with the kids. (With four kids that close in age, you pretty much had to
stay home, even if you didn’t want to, but she wanted to.) You’re probably
wondering what her husband did to support a family of six on a single income.
He must have been born into money, right? Nope. He started working at a factory
part-time while he was in high school. When he graduated, he went to work at
that same factory full time. Shortly after that, they bought a cheap
fixer-upper and lived there for a year or two until they had enough equity and
savings to buy a new home in a new development and kept the first house as a
rental. That’s it. No magical family inheritance. No college degree after high
school. No secret power moves. Just simple hard work and discipline. But, back
then—30 years ago…now I’m really making
myself sound old…that was the payoff you could expect from simple hard
work. But, times have changed. Boy have they changed. That factory is now
closed, so getting a job there isn’t an option for anyone, just in case you
thought you might be able to follow in his footsteps. At that time, you could
make a livable wage—enough to raise a family—with nothing more than a high
school education. It wasn’t hard to get a job in one of the many factories in
the area, and it was fairly simple to get a good, stable government job that
would promise you a good pension and benefits.
That’s all changed. That same guy who raised a family
straight out of high school eventually got a college degree, about 20 years later,
and only so he could move up within that same company. When I was your age, if
you had a high school diploma, you were okay. A four-year degree, and the world
was pretty much completely open to you. Now you just about need a master’s
degree to be remotely competitive, and on top of that, the cost of college has
gotten ridiculous.
Community college was $5 a unit when I graduated high
school. Yes, that’s correct. It’s not a typo. It was $5. Minimum wage was $3.35
at that time. Sure, minimum wage has tripled since then, but community college
is now $46 per unit—more than nine times what it was when I graduated from high
school. You are in a difficult situation. College really isn’t a choice for you
to make a livable wage. It’s a necessity. Especially if you dream of ever
owning a home and raising a family. That means that either your parents had to
have saved a lot of money for you, or you are going to need a lot of grants or
scholarships. If those didn’t work out for you, then you’re looking at big, fat
student loans. So now you’re in the precarious situation of trying to find a
job that will pay enough for you to pay your student loans while paying all the
normal bills that come with “adulting.” Honestly, I don’t know how so many of
you do it, and I understand why so many of you are still living with your
parents. As if that’s not enough, you are facing a national housing crisis, so
not only does the idea of buying a house seem like folklore, the simple act of
finding a place to rent that you can afford presents further challenges for
you. (I understand and share your fear and challenge of increasing rents and
housing costs, but I’ll save the topic of housing and increasing rents for
another post.)
I’m sorry you are in this tough situation. While I may not
be solely responsible for the mess you are inheriting, I acknowledge that it
was the decisions of my generation and the generations before that got us to
where we are today. This is not to say that the generations before you haven’t
done good things as well, because they have, but they haven’t been perfect, or
you wouldn’t be facing the challenges before you.
My fault in all of this is that I’ve only been truly involved
in my community for a little over a year. (I’ll also save that story for a
later post.) I have to admit that most of my life, I was complacent to what was
going on around me. I felt no reason to get involved. Either issues didn’t move
me enough to do so, or I felt that I lacked the knowledge to speak on a topic,
or I felt that my single voice didn’t make a difference. And more accurately,
my life was fairly comfortable, so the necessity to get involved wasn’t there. Don’t
make the same mistake I made. Your voice matters, and it matters more than you
may realize.
The world we are in now is the world you are inheriting. At
this moment, you share stewardship of the world with my generation and the
generations before me. Your co-stewardship gives you a right to be a voice in
how we shape the world, because one day, you will be the majority group making the
decisions. One day one of you will even be president. Don’t wait until all of
us old folks die to make your voice heard or to start tackling the issues. You’ve
grown up in a different world, and you have a different perspective. Your
generation now makes up the largest
part of the population, and that alone gives you great power. So get
involved now. Get your peers
involved. Your generation should be reflected in our businesses, government,
community organizations and everywhere else. So often when I’ve talked with
many of you, I’ve not only been impressed with how intelligent and creative you
are, but I’ve learned so much from you. You can make a huge difference.
One thing I’ve learned in my nearly 50 years of life is that
there are many things that only time brings, including wisdom and experience.
That’s not to say that you can’t have both when you are younger, but they
become more refined as you become more “seasoned.” That’s why we need each
other. You need us old folks to share our wisdom and experience with you, but we
need your creativity and fresh perspective. We must both come to the table with
an open mind that is respectful and desirous of solutions. Do not blindly
follow us, and do not take a position of opposition simply out of frustration.
But, do challenge us. Question us. Share your ideas with us. Let’s work
together toward a better life for all of us, including your generation and all
the generations that will come after you. And do not ever let anyone dismiss you because you “are too young to
understand” or that you “weren’t here to know what it was like.” It is your
youth that brings fresh perspectives. It is because you haven’t had the old
ways engrained in you that can see things differently and offer new ideas. I
need you, we need you and the future needs you. And, we need each other.
It’s a very different world today than it was when I was
your age, and that means it’s time to do things differently. But please don’t
take my word for it. Do your own research. Look at all sides of the issues. Talk
to people of different backgrounds and professions. You may find it
frustrating, because the more you learn, the more you’ll discover how complex
most situations are, whether it’s the housing crisis, climate change, housing
the homeless, social injustice or anything else. But I believe in you. You give
me hope that we can create a better future for you, your children and your
children’s children.
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