People say that we millennials are an entitled generation, and I think it's an accurate description. We grew up under the mantra of entitlement and saw the world at our feet, and now that we are entering the job market, still expect it to be there. We won't settle for less because we expect the most. We expect fairness, honesty, and equal opportunity, and because we are so disposed to demand such things, we are envied by those who were born having to settle for whatever they could get, and from that envy comes their damning characterizations of us. Of course not all people born between the years 1980 and 1995 are this way, but since this is how the same adults have chosen to represent us, we're obliged to indulge them.
We'll graduate from the top schools and go on aid missions around the globe, have resumes that stretch a page by the time we're fifteen, but we don't know the basics of punching a time clock, showing up and putting out, day in and day out. We're more special than ordinary people. Mowing the lawn for cash was never going to get us into Princeton, so we never did it. We then expect a title and a name on the door right out of the production line degree mill we just graduated from, and because those same adults always told us it was all within reach since we were small, we're demanding it now. Some of us are actually finding it, and some are facing the reality we always knew was there (despite the adults' best efforts to hide it from us).
And it's all thanks to the notion that "Every child should go to college." It's all thanks to the notion that "children who don't go to college turn out to be sleeping in the streets." When every child goes to college, we turn into a society of a skills abundance in limited use. It's all thanks to that notion that "no child should have to face adversity." It's all thanks to the concept that "children are innocent, and therefore must be spared from the adult world." I say, welcome to the new, happier, freer adulthood, where anyone can be anything they want to be--born not out of austerity, but from the dream of abundance--and pursuing not society's destruction (for once), but its constant creation and rebirth.
We of course remember those who came before us (...those who would criticize our sense of entitlement now), and struggle to live up to their esteemed shadow:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for angry fix.
--Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1956)
But with entitlement comes responsibility, and we just have higher aspirations than being "destroyed by madness" or settling for less. We have careers to think about.
Now I still believe in reality, despite how I was raised--a reality where nobody cares about anyone, and least of all me. At the same time, I think there are still lessons to be learned from this cultural shift--from those who settle for whatever they can get to those who believe the choice is theirs--and that is of perseverance. Where the best among the youth of the past were having good times, destroying all modernity, the best of this generation are embracing modernity, and contributing for the good of society--not because they have to, but because they want to.
No child should "ever" have to face disappointment, they said, so I refuse to be disappointed. No matter what disappointment rears up, I refuse to let it put me down like it did those before me, because "greatness" is inevitably within my grasp, as it is for everyone equally, eventually. Reality, bring on the world.
The youth street riots in England show us what happens when government flat out ignores the needs of young people for too long. When government no longer seems to work for the people, regardless of age or social class, the people become disillusioned with it, and angry with it, and angry with the society that embraces it. The behavior of the rioters is reprehensible and by no means do I wish to endorse it, as there is no doubt it has nothing to do with legitimate protest. There's been a lot of speculation about the cause though, and a lot of accusations against indirect cultural influences, but no inciting incident or clear motivation can be tagged. This is simply because the uprisings are instead the inevitable product of years and years of pent-up social frustration with a civil society that has continuously sidelined the millennial generation.
It comes with great shame to me, being a member of that generation, that they have resorted to this, but while I can't endorse their unbridled destructiveness, I can at least sympathize with the spark of frustration that caused it. I seem to remember a year or so prior to this unrest, the UK government unequivocally shouting down mass youth protests--legitimate, non-violent protests--against the government's insistence on shutting down student loans and increasing interest rates on them, all while tuition in the UK is set to double by next year, and all while youth unemployment is up to 20% in the UK.
The old guard in government, who rode through college in the age of state-paid, free tuition, effectively see nothing wrong with sending young people out into the world with debts reaching up to six figures--and while that is good news for the same "old guard" special interests (who never have to share any of the fiscal burden), it is bad news for young people who would have to make the sacrifice. So the young people fought, and the government refused to listen, and when the government no longer listens, the young people got frustrated.
And they have a right to be frustrated. They've been given no reason to think the government actually works for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, and it's because it hasn't worked for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, for decades. It hasn't because it has surrendered its duties to the wealthy and the corporations, who have done nothing but pocket the benefits for themselves. With average citizens being unable to affect change against massive special interests who pay their way into politician's pockets, they lose faith in the system, they lose faith in democracy, and they lose faith in civil society. Once that happens, they constitute for themselves a civil disorder--and it may very well be a psychological release of pent-up energies, a joy ride of smashing and looting--but it has its roots with the unresponsiveness of society.
What shames me about the riots is the indiscriminate path of their destructiveness, affecting small business owners and other private property in particular. These local merchants and residents did not deserve being so much as touched, as they had nothing to do with the government being unresponsive to the needs of young people. The young should have been using their social media to a call for non-violent resistance and organize walk-outs and sit down strikes. All they accomplished in pursuing violence was to throw their oppressive government into overdrive. Thousands of arrests have been made, and youth curfews have spread all over the world (Philadelphia for example). Instead of dismantling civil society, young people should stop it from being able to function. The government has to be starved by its disaffected until it realizes why it needs them.
If government no longer works for you, you ought to no longer work for it. It's called the social contract.
There's going to be a cultural war between the members of the millennial generation --between those who are rational and skeptical, and those who are influenced by the visceral and sensational. This is to say, it will be waged between those who accept reality and the unshakable flaws and powers of human nature, and those who want to save the world with uncompromising ideology. And how can someone like myself know this outcome with such certainty? It is probably because there is nothing new about it.
There will always be those who want to save the world and those who want to help the world. Those who have endeavored to save the world have failed, and those who have worked to help it, have succeeded only so long as they are permitted to do so by those who are trying to save it. Helping is a selfless act to assist another when it is needed and asked for, whereas saving is a selfish act meant to make one appear like a savior when the assistance is neither required or asked for. Those who help try to accept the failures of human nature and persevere in spite of them. Those who play savior try to eliminate the failings of human nature so that they may supersede it with an ideal. There is nothing new about cult behavior though. We must be weary of it, but not fearful of it or destructive towards it. Ideology seeks out enemies to destroy, and creates new ones by doing so. Rationality speaks truth to power, and finds friends with all those who seek justice without destruction.
The same is true for how we respond to our children. There are those who want to help children and those who want to save the children. Those who help children are able to see their fallible human nature, and find ways to work around it with them. Those who want to save children either want to pretend that children are infallible (Indigo children), or try to eliminate the fallible qualities of a child's human nature completely so that they may match with the cultural standards of children as infallible. The mechanism by which the adult saves children appears to be by subverting their humanity, whereby the mechanism the adult helps children is through recognizing and empowering it (by overcoming faults). What is true for how we raise children, is true for society.
Human nature has a variety of expression, but it is a finite expression that is then malleable by culture and economics. Anyone who attempts to posit that it is entirely a creation of culture and circumstance (the Marxists), or posits that it is entirely innate, is preceding from false assumptions. Anyone who thinks they can invent some ideology to "wake the world up" from its sleepwalk into doomsday by convincing the people that their governments and corporations have created human nature in its entirety, is selling a contradiction. On the one hand, they say human nature is being exploited in order to propagate an ideology, and on the other, that human nature is a mere creation and doesn't exist naturally. How can human beings be as we picture children--mindless drones one minute when in the hands of the group the onlooker despises, and the next, intentional beings once fallen under the spell of that onlooker? The onlooker exploits their human nature by telling them their nature is a creation.
There has become such a thing as an anti-ideology ideology. It proposes that people are becoming sedated by the ideologies they absorb on a daily basis in their information-rich contexts--leaving out of course that the "ideology of ideological sedation" is itself part of that information bombardment. So we have people panicked over how children will grow up with impairments due to exposure to certain ideologies, not realizing that restricting them from ideology is itself an ideology that they are inadvertently exposing their children to. This is not to say that we ought to be anxious that anti-ideologies are still ideologies, falling prey to an endless loop of paranoia about the effects of anti-ideology ideologies--if that is confusing, good, because it's irrational. Instead, what is meant by this is simply that we ought to accept that reality, accept that things we may not like exist and will always exist, and then do our best to recognize them and step around them when we see them.
Children are human beings, they are not lifelong slaves to the ideology they heard when they were three years old. They can break out of the system if we work with them to teach them about the system. They can not break free if we shut them off to that critical information or neglect to teach it in fear that they will "fall prey to it." There is no reason to concern ourselves so much with what is going into them, because when we do that we fail to attend to what is coming out. When we focus our attention on covering their ears so that information we don't like can't seep in, we forget to listen to what is coming out of their mouths. When we spend our time blocking their eyes so that they can't see something, we blind ourselves to what is coming out in their physical movements. For every inch we think we gain on their ability to understand the world, we give up our understanding of them.
Now this should not be a worrisome trend, seeing as what will happen will happen--intervention only stops what we imagine from happening, it doesn't stop what we can't imagine. In all likelihood, what we can't imagine is what is probably going to happen. We have no control over outcomes, just the social devices we choose to get there. Discussion and education is what informs a human being's choices, and a child's outcomes, not mere exposure to certain ideas. What is true for children is true for society.
Boomers had it wrong. We millennials are the ones 'dying before we get old'--or middle aged even. We came out of the helicopter parenting homes of our me-first centered parents, set up with a tolerance for everything and a drive toward nothing in particular, and like all children, have either decided within ourselves to overcome those limitations or succumb to them. Ours is not unlike those of previous eras, both the sedentary and active, and certainly economic circumstances contribute to our attitudes and tendency to "return," but cultural ones also play a part in molding the lackadaisical expectations from life that forced us back to your arms.
Those who have succumbed to perpetual childhood are the creatures like myself, those who were bred with an idea of entitlement, who sat back and absorbed all the information and knowledge possible from trusted adult sources and lived a model "child" lifestyle just to be left with an enormous load of expectations. The generational neuroticism and fetishism over protectionism in the past two decades has not protected us from the pains of growing up. It may have staved off the bug bites and bruises at times, but it hasn't taught us how to treat such inflictions when they happen in the course of normal living, in a manner of speaking. On the contrary, those who have managed to overcome the neuroses of the previous generation are those who will go the farthest to invent their own, but at least they should get credit for being original.
What is particularly absurd is this idea that we are supposed to grow up. Come on now! This is something new for sure. Were other generations expected to grow up at some point? You could have fooled me all those years. Certainly had we been told at any time during our development that eventually one day we'd have to direct our own affairs and live our own lives, I think I would have heard about it. How do you expect us to get out of our basement bedrooms now if that is where you would have had us confined for the first ten years (for the sake of your precious "peace of mind")?--if you never let us play outside lest we hit the poison ivy, or hit our head on the cement, or dash our foot upon a stone, or God forbid, play a touch sport!
Is it no wonder that we have gone off to college and done the required extra lap, the four year extension of high school, only to show our faces again at the end of the conveyor belt that had always been our education? Come now, a quarter of our lives was spent before we were even allowed
to live like human beings, and now you expect us to live like adults? Did you not say we were special? Did you not always welcome us with open arms, and provide us all the praise we needed in our screw ups? Did you not say we should come to you and you alone for all our problems? Did you not expect we'd return to you?
What is controversial to adults is commonplace to the young. What the adults find amusing about contemporary social awakenings, children living today have been hearing about their entire lives. There is nothing special or even different about the gay lifestyle, for instance, if you have grown up in a world where it is an acceptable part of your culture. What is exotic or abhorrent to one group becomes the new normal in the course of even just one generation's time on earth.
It is totally understandable that human beings are continual prisoners to the customs of their little spot on the globe in the little span of time they have to dwell in it--what is not understandable is why, given this, so many of them seem to think that their unique (regional and temporal) perspective is the be-all end-all truth of existence. Take whatever superstition you have about a social issue, and move that idea half way around the world, or even just 50 years into the future, and suddenly you'll find no more truth in it than the superstitions a half a world away, or from 50 years ago.
There are a few constants over time though--the so-called eternal human condition. These are what may constitute general categories (good and bad...etc.) for assigning temporal phenomena. When I talk of what is evil and what is good, this is what I mean.
For all the fretting that adults do foretelling the demise of human civilization based on the behaviors and interests of children in the present, what good has it done the human race? There's this error in our reasoning that suggests the way a child is today inevitably predicts with straight line accuracy what the child will be like as an adult. If the child is playing video games or preferring their virtual social life to their surroundings, it's seen as if we're destined to have a future where all are strapped in to a virtual existence from which there is no escape and human civilization is once again doomed. Adults may even take pride in the action of stripping a child of their opportunity to engross themselves in the media of the times, thinking that by doing so they are single handedly saving the future of humanity. What self aggrandizing pride is this?
What human beings typically lack is the ability to foresee a future for humanity no different than the present, not better, not worse (as far as these basic grievances are concerned). There's this thinking that if a boy is allowed to play violent video games today, that the society he grows up to participate in will be one that looks the other way on gun crimes (as they had been exposed to so much of it). They do not factor in the humanity of their own children when forecasting the downfall of human decency. They figure "once a mindless drone, always a mindless drone," when their child was never a drone to begin with, but a person capable of reason.
There's a failure to foresee the likeliest of all possible futures, one where the children of today grow up to become adults who will themselves be fretting over something else the children of that time have been exposed to. Despite this trend happening every generation for hundreds of years, adults seem to think this is the generation that finally breaks the cycle and destroys society. Every generation is the end of the line for us, whether it be caused by rock and roll music, video games, rap music, drug use, internet, cell phones, or anything else adults have had trouble understanding.
Let's not fret over what children are involved in today en mass--individual children we can at least talk to--because en mass they simply are not as fragile as adults think they are. In 50 years time, many of the adults alive today will either be dead or elderly, and the world will be a much different place than it is now. The issues and problems of today will either be long resolved, or will cease to be major problems--the preoccupations of today will not last forever. The children will have grown up into similar versions of the adults that came before them, with all the same fretting, perhaps only about different trends.
In 50 years time, the children of today, who have grown up in a totally different world than the previous generation, will inevitably take the trends of today and expand upon them in the future--and no amount of restricting them now is going to stop this from happening. Children change over time, they don't stay children forever. They grow up and become the next wave of adults doing exactly what the previous wave did, only responding to different wind shifts.
Each generation gets its one shot to move the world and society along on the track before handing what it has created off to the next batch of people to do what they please with it. The passage of the earth from one generation to the next is like the old "running with the egg" race, where one player passes an egg balancing on a spoon off to the next player, who then takes it a ways before passing it off to another. The object is to not crack the egg, which for our illustration represents the earth. The thing is, adults do not trust the player they are handing the egg to continue seeing the value of keeping it intact. What happens though is the next generation always does anyways--as they go off to become that society, while the previous generation becomes too old and too dead to really see how their progeny has defied their expectations, time and time again.
So please, be not troubled, because the first one now will later be last, and the last, first. There is no better or worse, no more depravity or social isolation, or whatever our anxiety makes us imagine--there is only progression through time. Children are going to rule the world someday and move it in directions we can only fathom, and they're going to do it regardless of how much fretting is done about how they've been picking their noses today.
Generational taxation is the enslavement of future generations (made up from the children alive now and soon to be), for all their lives, to the problems created by the evil and the powerful today. This is true taxation without representation, because those forced to bare it have not had the chance to be represented yet, indeed, many of them have yet to be born. It is the tyranny of the present over the freedoms of the future. The economic, ecological, and human rights debts of the present will confound and ultimately limit the freedoms of our posterity, and we (as residents of the present) are solely responsible for creating it. And by we, I mean the we that allowed our civilization to run itself on the whims of psychopathic multinational corporations.
"Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to a nice person. It means you take a private institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny." -Noam Chomsky, in "The Corporation"
These are the types that have brought you up believing that the greatest risk to your children are communists, terrorists, child molesters, kidnappers, immigrants--anyone but them. So allow me to add one more, one that supersedes all others because unlike the others, it can convince you that it means well even after it has set its poison on your kids. What child molester could accomplish the feat a corporation can after the fact?
Who is the one not batting an eyelash at the incidence of E Coli in the food that parents are unknowingly feeding their children? Who is not batting an eyelash after a four-year-old's hemorrhagic diarrhea because serving him a petri dish of "all natural" microorganisms is more profitable than a safe product? Where is any private corporation's moral high ground then to persuade you against all those other so-called 'risks' to your children? Those I've endeavored to label as antichrists. If they could spray DDT on your children 50 years ago and sell you on it under the name of protection, what makes you think their modern corporate progeny isn't capable of doing the same thing again, just with different chemicals? For the modern equivalent, look no further than the rBGH milk you give to children in their morning bowl of Kix--you'll find Agent Orange producer Monsanto has been sticking their fingers down every glass.
The tyranny of the present means marketers preying on the developmental vulnerability of children like child molesters--the only difference between the two is that the likelihood of a child molester reaching "your" child is phenomenally slim compared to the bombarding certainty of advertising. This is how such a thing as the "nag" factor, where children are expected to nag parents for products they've seen in advertising, is a 12 billion dollar a year industry. The tyranny of the present on the freedoms the future means created wants formed by manufactured consent. Just as a child rapist may manufacture this idea that the victim needed and enjoyed the rape, the child marketer wants to bleed children of this same notion of manufactured consent based around a want they had to instill in the child to begin with. Doesn't this sound familiar? And to think they worked so hard convincing you that the enemy was elsewhere.
These are the ones who never want to talk about what they do unless they can open their mouths with the words "We here at...". Unless they can sell you on their "humanity" just as they sold you on harmful drugs for your toddler, they don't have anything to say. If it can't be prompted, then they decline to comment. Prompted speech is the reflex of a prompted mind. These are entities with an inability to admit guilt to anything ever, or even romanticize the notion that their activities are responsible for the destruction of earth, humanity, and society. They are either in denial, are wracked with guilt, or are psychopaths. If the later, it goes far to explain the corporate entity's complete disdain, disrespect, and inhuman treatment of the lives and dignity of human beings.
Only a psychopath could will such complete control over human beings and glorify it to the extent that corporate interests do. Since the corporations fought to get the representation as individuals and all the rights and benefits thereof, we ought to think of them as such, and see them for the kind of individuals they are (formless, immortal, and unburdened by remorse): certifiable psychopaths. This is why big business is the source of all that is destroying the world. They take no responsibility because they are incapable of feeling responsible. This is the mark of an antichrist.
One letter switch separates "veil" for "evil," and for good reason, as everything that is veiled behind the propaganda machine that is advertisement, is undoubtedly evil. This is not to say that it is an unnecessary evil, for evil makes the world go round, evil puts meals in children's stomachs--but evil is still evil even if it causes one tenth of one percent of good. These corporate persons with which we have increasingly been entrusting the welfare of our children to, are not just soulless and profit-motivated, they are evil. Their shareholders and organizers rise from bed every morning, kiss their children on the forehead, and go off into the world to do evil work--necessary work some could argue, but still evil work (whoever said only good work was necessary?). The work they do ensures one more day of the enslavement of their grandchildren to the unintended consequences of how they are making their living today.
Someone has to pick up the tab for it, and one generation becomes enslaved to the debts of the last--monetarily, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. That is what I call generational taxation, and it is an antichrist.
It's true, the play space is where kids plot out their method for world domination. These methods won't be taking effect immediately, but at some point, the children alive today, who you see out playing, will take over the world, and the kind of space they have to practice out their methods now makes all the difference over whether they chose to simply replace us, or take us out by force and demand something better. The powerful and the downpresser would prefer a gentle replacement that benefits them unto and beyond the end, but the powerless want their children to be a force onto themselves, bold enough to fix what does not work, stand up for what is good and just, and throw those benefiting from the broken system into the ground as fast as possible. At least, that is how the adults have decided to use children.
The economic engines of our society have attempted to create a generation contented on its own gluttony and self-absorbsion, and it's not so much a conspiracy as it is just good business practice. If you want future customers or constituents, you only tell the incoming generation to challenge authority if you intend on being the authority, otherwise, you close and limit their play spaces, and distract them with your gadgets so they never have to leave a parent's sight. But then when that technology expands their new insular play worlds to the largely unregulated spheres of play found online, a problem develops, for they become "beyond control" once again, and therefore a threat to power. The powerful then endeavor to turn even their newly formed online play spaces into havens of corruption. Simply put, adults don't want kids playing in or outside the box, not behind the shed, not in the house, not in their room, not stuck to their computer--they don't want them playing here or there, they don't want them playing anywhere!
A child caught walking the public streets could easily find themselves in the back of a police car. A group of kids playing in the woods could find themselves branded as hoodlums and once again thrown in the back of a police car. Gone are the days when the cop would tell them to "get on home." Now the message they're given, should they choose to accept it, is that either their home is the shopping plaza, their own backyard, or if not, it's the hold up at the police station. Simply put, adults don't want their children in this day in age to play in the uncouth, unstructured, unsupervised ways in which a child seems naturally drawn. Most parents, most townships, most police, don't want children learning too much about what it means to be a free individual because a free individual is encouraged by a free, wide open to roam place space to think free thoughts--thoughts that threaten those who stand to gain from a broken world. They want the next generation to be "good little goobers" now, and forever.
One play space is really no more or less superior than another for children to learn about the workings of the world and other people, whether it is online or out in the neighborhoods of the sticks and concrete jungles alike. They will naturally test out their strengths and weaknesses, socialize, and grow fond of each other in these social spheres, regardless of what any adult tries to do to stop them. They carve out their own decadence in a world that adults wish to fashion for themselves alone, and that's why it is discouraged. But the adults are fighting the losing battle, for it is just a fact of nature that the children, regardless of what is put into them now, will someday rule the world, it is only a question of time.
We didn't really have what the kids growing up in this day in age have, we of the generation Y. We were in the unfortunate position of having our physical play spaces limited by the PC "don't let the kids ever get hurt" parenting, and at the same time, didn't have the boundless internet where we could replace that missing play space. We had no acceptable place where we could be truly beyond the eyes of our overlords, and because of that lack of opportunity to direct our own purpose, we were grown spineless. Due to the internet, we can't expect the same from generation Z, who grew up in a world divorced from many adult's understanding. The internet has become our mode of cultural rebellion, it is our play space--for now at least, so let the revolution commence.
Are children these days out of control or are they just pawns of the system? Are they on the warpath against civilization, blowing up schools, or are they just shills for gadgetry and merchandise? Are they too rebellious or too submissive? Don't ask your average adult, because they will say something different depending on the context from which the question is asked. Adults think contradictory things about the collective nature of children.
There is nothing human beings of any age like more than to build things up just to tear them back down. As children do with block towers, adults do with other human beings, and children are not off limits. Are they truly innocent or are they culpable? Are they society's "raison d'etre" or just a social burden? Are they "too young to know" or are they stupid, irreverent, or ignorant? Adults can't even seem to agree on whether young people know how to work or whether they really know how to have fun.
The one thing they rarely do though, unless brought to this understanding, is let the new generations define themselves. It is not unreasonable, at least not as unreasonable as dismissing "the modern kids" for being one thing, and then dismissing them as the opposite when it applies. It doesn't help then, that adults create many of the circumstances that they later dismiss young people for either falling too infatuated with or falling too far away from. Perhaps they are all these things at once just because there are so many of them.
The Boomers were a whiny generation from the get-go. They had major issues with authority to their ultimate slow degeneration. Born out of nuclear conformity and hysteria, they marched upon the earth as a bunch of kicks-seeking go-getters, preached universal love and tree-hugging only to crash and burn in a cocaine blitz and set themselves to work confining, restricting, and finding new ways to control the younger generations to the drum beat of "The War on Drugs", "Zero Tolerance", and "Reviving Ophelia."
As a result, their children grew up in a world full of their parents flexing their demons, never knowing a world where holding a squirt gun in a crowd wouldn't find them in the back of a police car, or where they could walk to school unsupervised without having Child Protective Services stop by for a visit, where they could play football or dodgeball in school, or simply be a "boy". If the Millenials have any failing point, we at least know the culprit.
In the meantime, the intervening generation, the X'ers, blazed a trail of self-absorption that now finds them in the throes of mainstream power, working to sedate the younger generations with their technological gadgetry. Their children are growing up never knowing a world where cellphones don't exist, where the internet doesn't exist, where satisfaction doesn't come instantly fulfilled, where dependence on technology wasn't considered progress.
There's a reason the X'ers have been called, for a long time, the Me Generation, because if it wasn't for being able to hop on the latest techno-trend to satisfy themselves before all else, they'd have to take a long hard look at themselves without the technological extensions of their personality and see just how little control they have, having surrendered themselves to their desires. So there's no question that they've set loose their demons on their own progeny, the kids, the Z's.
What is the fate? The Millenials will embrace new thinking about the social structure of society, such as the ill-conceived Venus Project (which so many of them already do), green technologies, gay rights, and other social causes, but they will ultimately fall short because they were bred without a spine to implement their dreams, and will slip slide into obscurity and confusion and wrest scorn from their progeny. They will be lots of talk and little resolve.
For the kids, the Z's, all one can foresee is absolute and total rebellion. Having grown up totally pacified by the internet and instant gratification of desire, they will begin to yearn for something "more," in fact, they may be termed the "More Generation," trying to break free from their parent's "me-centered" egotistical philosophies, they will perhaps embark on more spiritual-fed paths of communal rebellion (subversion of their parents' internet). Such is a prediction.
