Tag Archives: millennial

Shot Across my Boomer Bow

I think there are way too few conversations going on between us Baby Boomers and our kids’ generation about our commonalities and areas of divergence and friction. Given that, when our young adult son Eric posted a link on Facebook the other day with the following intro…

Everyone should read (and share) this. Everyone.

Followed by posting a provocative quote from the linked piece…

“From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.”

I took notice!

Eric, now 26, has emerged from his youth into adulthood as a thoughtful person not prone to hyperbole, and someone I (biased perhaps) would consider a thoughtful spokesperson for his circle of young adult peers and his “Millennial” generation.

Eric’s must read is a piece in the April 2012 edition of Esquire magazine, “The War Against Youth”, by 36-year-old Canadian Stephen Marche, who writes a monthly column for the magazine, “A Thousand Words about Our Culture”.

FYI… Per a short Wikipedia article on Marche, he was a finalist for the 2011 American Society of Magazine Editors award for columns and commentary. Also noted in that article, is that during a Canadian election campaign in October 2010, the Toronto Globe and Mail published online a commentary by Marche where he “effusively taunted a candidate for mayor of Toronto for the man’s obesity”. Assuming both these citations are true, Marche perhaps combines an incisive social criticism with a penchant for anger and at times hurtful words. But given Eric’s nod, I don’t necessarily want to judge the message by the messenger.

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