March of 2020 has seen a lot of us glued to our Twitter feeds or 24 hours news cycle, as a pandemic becomes the headline of the day. While a lot of the news coverage has been problematic, one particular type of article has been making the rounds recently due to the yearly celebration of spring break. What many news stories fail to specify is that “millennial” doesn’t just mean, “a younger person you’re not fond of”. Generally, we were born between 1981 and 1996.
When I was nine they told us the president was in trouble because he lied to the American people but what I remember is a joke about a vending machine and a dollar bill and not understanding why it was funny.
When I was eleven my principal sat my entire middle school on the stairs in our hallway to remind us all to watch the news. We were electing a new president (not the one from the vending machine) and the votes were very close. He told us it would likely be the defining news story of our lifetime.
A year later I was twelve and sitting on those same steps when our principal told us there had been a terrible accident. It was September 11th. I had to ask the boy sitting behind me what the Pentagon was. So many people thought the world had turned upside down only a year before.
At fourteen my class trip to Washington DC was canceled because there was a sniper shooting random people on streets and in parking lots. Instead, we were supposed to go to Toronto but the SARS epidemic was spreading and Canada had the only confirmed deaths in the Western Hemisphere. Our school never shut down so my class ended up spending a few days in Boston. Before we ever got to Boston the US started bombing Iraq.
Over summer vacation, when I was sixteen, my mom called me downstairs as CNN began running a broadcast on bombings in London on their subway system and double-decker buses. I wondered if my best friend, away at camp, had heard the news. Not all bombings look the same on TV.
Right before beginning my junior year of high school Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of the southeastern United States. People sat on top of their homes with hastily assembled SOS signs that only media helicopters seemed to get close enough to read.
From far away satellites picked up the first test of North Korean nuclear missiles as I started my senior year. World War III was supposed to find us.
By the time I graduated college the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession. I was going to be a part of the first generation in America to be less successful, overall, than our parents.
So as a millennial I already understand that the people in power cannot always be trusted, that what today seems bad can always be worse. Bad things happen across the globe in a single moment. Sometimes those things are man maid, sometimes those things are an act of nature, and sometimes it’s a bit of both. The world is always ending. But we millennials know how to listen. We are always paying attention.