Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us

Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us
To those of us who have lived with certain grim realities our whole adult lives — the widening moat between the rich
and the rest of us, the sclerotic influence of money on politics, the N. R.A.’s unassailable coalition of greed and fear — they seem like facts of life as unalterable as death itself.
Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me
that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths.
Those kids have suddenly understood how little their lives were ever worth to the people in power.
Despite all our competitive parenting and mommy machismo
and trophy kids, we don’t really give a damn about our children — by which I mean, about one another’s.
I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you’re in the wrong, because you’re going to die and they’ll get to write history, but I just can’t help noticing
that the liberal side isn’t much fun to be on anymore.
Like most people in middle age, I regard young people with suspicion.
The young — and the young at mind — tend to be uncompromising absolutists.
Kids don’t have money and can’t vote, and until now burying a few dozen a year has apparently been a price
that lots of Americans were willing to pay to hold onto the props of their pathetic role-playing fantasies.
Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them.