“Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” – Jack Weinberg,
activist, Free Speech Movement, Berkeley, California

Millennials have a lot going wrong with them – except for everything that can go right.  

It was one of the most famous slogans of the ‘60s, summing up the “generation gap” that was proclaimed to be, as a title to a Life Magazine article put it, “The Gulf Between Parents and Children.”¹ It could take the form of political arguments, deep divides in musical and literary taste, or, more viscerally, parent-child battles over drugs and sex.

Marshall McLuhan theorized that the generation gap was an effect of the explosion of new media on young people’s consciousnesses. Any number of political figures tied it to the civil rights struggle and the protests against the war in Vietnam. However you explained it, in most families in America you couldn’t escape it.

The Life article, naturally, focused on angry kids, alienated kids, kids on the streets. A 14½-year-old Sunset Strip groupie talked about taking marijuana, diet pills, and LSD; her combined age and drug and sexual experience made her every parent’s most extreme nightmare. But even her words revealed the Gap (yes, the company did get the name from that) was not unbridgeable when she simply and sadly stated, “My parents, they can’t do anything with me.”² She represented a host of young people who thought parents didn’t care what they did, and one or two kids said they missed discipline and being grounded. One young interviewee actually lamented “It seems that everybody’s childhood is getting shorter and shorter.”³

On the other side, a sympathetic parent suggested that “Now there is a real confusion for the kids about where they are going and how to get there. And there is this war in Vietnam with no end in sight.” Another kindly professional voice, a psychiatrist, pointed out that, especially in relation to the war, kids were smart enough to “criticize and be impaling parents on their own expressed ideals.” But countering such opinions were angrier parents accusing less stringent parents of being afraid of the kids, or “being ostriches. They can’t cope with them, can’t understand them, so they ignore them.”⁴

Part of the parental fear and anger stemmed not just from the orneriness of their individual children but the sheer size of the baby boom generation, as manifested in antiwar demonstrations and rock festivals. This would clearly be a force to be reckoned with. Part came from the radically different political views shared by many of the kids. Part came from their liberated sexual practices, made possible not just by new thinking but by use of “the Pill” for birth control. And there was also the need to understand the young baby boomers by understanding their new media: rock music above all, but also film and theatre that was obscene or nakedly sexual (often as in just plain naked), the first underground ‘zines out of the East Village and Haight Ashbury, and a whole new way of responding to television.

Much of this should now be sounding familiar. For in the millennial generation, loosely defined as individuals born between 1982 and 2004, we see all the characteristics of the ‘60s “youthquake.” The sheer size, even greater than the baby boom. The brand new musical tastes. The different politics from their parents. Sexual practices and views of the morality of sex that prompt amazement or aversion even in a generation that came through the “sexual revolution.” Different and scarier drugs of choice. And above all a whole new way of perceptually interacting with the world through the new media of smartphones, social networks, and the Internet.

Not surprisingly, as a result the ‘60s-style “generation gap” is back; it might not be as loud and out front and sloganized as it was in the ‘60s, but its definitely prompting a lot of unease and even dismay on both sides.

If there’s anything the ‘60s have to tell us about this generational difference, it’s obvious; please consider your youthful experiences, baby boomers, before you in any way judge or condemn youthful millennials. And baby boomer parents deserve credit for having in some cases bent over backwards to understand their children’s changing tastes and practices, although the best parents have underscored or, with younger millennials, are still underscoring, that there will be consequences for unacceptable behavior.

But before praising the millennial generation, it’s necessary to bury them a little. To criticize—with I hope some understanding—out of a duty to warn. Younger readers can dismiss this as a “get off my lawn” passage, but I promise there will be more empathetic paragraphs in this essay and a second essay addressing, per ‘60s history and thinking, some affirmative possibilities for millennials, especially college students, and how they can improve their lives. But first…

If I had a millennial daughter, I’d be terrified.

There’s an epidemic of sexual abuse and assault going on in the American millennial generation. From the rise in reports of incidents of sexual assault on college campuses to the nauseating incidence of sexual assault in the military—about 12,000 incidents reported in the 2012 documentary The Invisible War⁵ and significantly greater since then—this is a very serious problem (and not confined to women either). Even in its lesser manifestations, like young men in a group at Yale chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!” it’s pretty rank. It’s grown severe enough that there are now organizations such as Know Your IX: Empowering Students to Stop Sexual Assault, where students are guided on websites through reporting and pursuing a sexual assault case per Title IX and the Clery Act.

Sociologists and psychologists, I’m sure, are debating the reasons for this extensively. Perhaps it includes all the warrior myths, idiot hypermachoism (what Don DeLillo once described in his novel White Noise as the “great dark lake of male rage”)⁶ and sexual aggression and brutalism that underscores so much mass entertainment, and that now reaches all the way to the White House.

But in comparing boomers and millennials, part of the phenomenon is also a rise in both the incidence of reporting and the ways of dealing with the problem. During that sexual revolution of the ‘60s–‘70s, it was probably true that more of the sex, influenced by the youthful values of the time, was more peaceful and consensual (and mellowed due to mellower recreational highs)—but there was also less informed awareness about defining what wasn’t consensual, and much more of a reluctance to report it.

I learned a few years ago something that I’d never known at the time; that during the late ‘60s to early ‘70s and beyond my then all-male high school, Horace Mann, was in the grip of sexual abuse perpetrated by certain teachers, at least one of whom preyed on my classmates. But back then, especially in an all-boys school, and long before Title IX or sexual abuse survivor procedures or confessional TV shows, the forums for and the willingness to reveal such traumas were far less than they are now. Given that at least one of my classmates may have committed suicide because of a combination of possible sexual abuse and definite teacher-to-student mindfucking, I wish it had been otherwise.⁷

And it’s also true that there was what used to be called “male chauvinism” and outright sexual abuse among not just Mad Men-type executives but within the “free love” counterculture, where women were regularly expected to cook for the commune, be giving and forgiving sexual mamas, and generally take a secondary and pleasure-providing position. In its wicked satire on the counterculture, Neil’s Book of The Dead referenced the cry of “Chicks up front” that was heard at demonstrations. The idea was that cops would be less willing to beat women with their nightsticks, and if that weren’t the case … well, chicks up front.⁸

In fact, I know some parents of millennials who are amazed at how “good,” how relatively chaste or monogamous, they seem to be, compared to the sexual mores of young people of the ‘60s, heterosexual and gay, which were pretty unconstrained all the way until the 1980s AIDS epidemic. In a witty and thoughtful Time Magazine article, Joel Stein (no relation) makes the point that millennals are, if perhaps a narcissistic generation, polite and thoughtful, definitely on the herbivorous side.⁹

But in my neighborhood their inner carnivore comes out. That would be Kips Bay/Murray Hill in Manhattan, sometimes known as “Murray Hell” for, among other events, truly disgusting “Santacom” revelry and general prowling of bars and restaurants where all the manifestations of bros-before-hos sexism can be glimpsed, the kind of behavior where a guy drinks too much on a flight and gets aggressive and they have to divert the plane.

And it seems to me the young women aren’t exactly rushing away from all that. In a great Saturday Night Live sketch, Tina Fey played an Eastern European woman temporarily moving in with Lena Dunham’s Girls. When Jessa says she recently slept with three men, the Tina Fey character says she understands, she’s a prostitute. When Jessa laughingly says she didn’t take money, she replies, oh, you’re a failed prostitute.

Increasingly young millennial women are deciding not to fail. As recent articles in Vanity Fair and Manhattan’s Village Voice have pointed out they’re “sugaring” with rich clients, whom they meet via websites such as Special Arrangements, to exchange sex for rent or college costs. According to the articles, many of these young women feel they’re entirely in control in these sorts of relationships, a concept of sexual empowerment that dates back not to the ‘60s, and its prostitutes in the often violent grip of “the man,” but to an ‘80s concept of sexuality as power wielded by material girls, and, more recently, networking that has made it very hard out there for a pimp.¹⁰

One can feel ambivalent about self-employed here-and-there prostitution (and of course it’s not just women)—it’s between consenting adults and it’s not hugely different from some one-night stands, but there’s also the fact that, like any vice, you can take it up and it can eventually take up you. But it’s hard to have the same tolerance for what’s in effect unregulated concubinage—“unregulated” as in not even tempered by the unspoken rules, courtesies, and standards of, say, consorting with the Parisian Belle Epoque courtesans of Colette’s time. To those young men and women who say that “sugaring” is no different than a series of hookups via Tinder, or what was for my generation singles bars—well, how about how a Tinder night could become either “just one of those things” or a real relationship, as opposed to constantly being the good play-wife or the constantly up-for-it girlfriend/boyfriend “experience”? How that poisons one’s outlook on life and the world could be devastating.

So there definitely seems to be a contemporary boomer-millennial generation gap in sexual behavior. That goes along with differing political views; my female contemporaries don’t understand why many female millennials feel the feminism associated with Hillary Clinton is old-hat and unnecessary. It’s very troubling that Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, have put out a study, showcased in the New York Times, that shows how the millennial generation all over the western world for the past thirty years has basically lost faith in democracy, and views with indifference possibilities such as military takeover of their governments.¹¹ Even the fact that millennials strongly reject discrimination against gays and other minorities didn’t seem to translate in sufficient numbers to voting for a candidate who espoused their point of view. Millennials in the wake of Trump’s election might want to reconsider such (in)actions. A wall of little therapeutic post-its in New York’s Union Square subway station wall is touching, but it would have been better had you voted.

Fear and loathing over millennial drugs—MDNA, synthetic marijuana, Adderall, opiods, and heroin—seems justified; we’re beyond gateway drugs, we’re fully past the barrier, and the hospital statistics prove it out. Again, ‘60s youth had their bad LSD trips and heroin overdoses, so no judgment here, but fatal opioid o.d’s, especially when mixed with fentanyl, have become epidemic.

And then there’s the generation gap Marshall McLuhan observed and predicted accurately would be caused by the onset of new media. The deVIces (as Frank Zappa used to pronounce it, referring to other kinds of toys) and their use by millennials, puzzle and rankle even my more tech-savvy friends. The almost sleepwalker obsession with Pokemon Go; the conformity of speech (“trending words”), tastes, and behavior that constantly being online seems to induce; the downward-facing focus on the small screen that’s almost constant on the streets of New York, where it really does pay to be more alert; the need to have your matches made in compatibility cyberheaven—all of which inevitably leads to the corporations behind the deVIces having a captive audience for their messages and products, and for complex cultural and political thinking being reduced to 140 characters per tweet—one wonders if a great portion of the millennials have become app sock puppets.

But now let’s look at the other side of the modern generation gap, the side that, for many millennials, is looking more and more like a gap that’s becoming an abyss.

That military rife with sexual assaults was swelled by millennials responding to 9/11 by unselfishly enlisting to serve their country. Our baby boom President George W. Bush’s administration sent them into one near-endless and a second seemingly endless war—the first of which was driven by blunders and lies—then put them through horrific repeated deployments, then welcomed them back with delayed/denied medical care, especially negligent with regard to their mental health.

Is this, many veteran millennials now ask, the reward for their service, and what they can expect in the future? Talk about, as that ‘60s parent said, a real confusion, and a war with no end in sight.

We also didn’t make a sufficient effort to provide employment for veterans. Of course maybe that’s in part because employers didn’t have the nerve to cajole and compel young veterans to work for nothing. Many millennial college graduates are now expected to work in internships that are sold as training for almost certain jobs in the future, for which the pay is exactly $7.25 less than the federal minimum wage, or zero. This is especially true for many of the glamour professions of the cities of New York and Los Angeles, two of the most expensive cities in the country. Many of these interns still live with their parents or three-to-a-one-bedroom in Soho or in what remains of affordable Brooklyn or Ridgewood, Queens, where a landlord may demand three months or more rent as security.

The whole internship practice is unconscionable, even if just for a summer; summer jobs for adolescents used to be a combination of grunt work plus potential training, and we used to get paid for them. There should be mandatory minimum wages for interns on Wall Street as well as workers at McDonald’s, especially if the internship goes on for more than a couple of months. Until then, it’s understandable that a percentage of young men and women have taken up “sugaring.” They’re already free sugar for their employers.

And there’s a price to be paid for those de-VI-ces and the immersion in cyberspace they bring, and it’s not the costs of constantly upgrading your iPhone, or dousing your Samsung, or even vulnerability to hacking, phishing, and other cyber-mischief.

McLuhan was one of the first to point out the effect of the impingement of new media on ways of communication and expression, the intense perceptual and cognitive modification involved. In the case of the Internet it really can pull you into a secret invisible world, a cyberspace collective unconscious in a way Jung never imagined. And that unconscious has its monsters of the id. Two years ago The New York Times told the story of “Obnoxious” and his “swatting” of women online: Twitch, a site where people can watch other people play videogames, was gradually infiltrated by this depressive little fiend, who subjected women to ddos attacks and slowed down their Internet until they did what he said (like sending him nude pictures), and who then progressed to “swatting” the ones he didn’t like (as in faking calls that sent SWAT teams to their residences).¹² And there have been many suicides due the kind of cyberbullying that brands you as pathetic or repulsive and makes that image of you universally available to the online world, including the suicide of a married young woman strong enough to become a firefighter.

For millennials, the Web is indeed that, an all-surrounding entity, an extension of personal space that can become a frightening ensnarement. It’s much easier for those of us who remember a world without the Internet to detach from it when it’s contaminated by the mental semen of evil morons. For those for whom cyberspace is every bit as important as “irl” (in real life) there needs to be more rigorous patrolling, but megacorporations such as Twitter have complied at best reluctantly and incompletely with that imperative.

And consider all the existential threats millennials face: nuclear war, climate cancer, new diseases (one that strikes at pregnancy), and global terrorism. In the ‘60s, except for a very immediate possibility of nuclear war, we only had one such immediately pressing threat for young men: the draft. Any young man at the time, including college students in the early ‘70s, could be subject to compulsory call-up and forced service in feared and hated combat in Vietnam. Many fled to Canada, or even chose prison. Others swelled the antiwar movement by the thousands.

Yet college-age millennials face the same kind of big D threat to, if not life and limb, at least a productive and sustainable future existence, and they don’t seem to be uniting against it yet … The debt. College-related fees and costs are saddling many young men and women with, in effect, twenty- to thirty-year mortgages: $30,000, $80,000, for the dental student who last year deep-cleaned my teeth $125,000.

Seen the commercial where the financial planner says to a woman barely in her twenties “let’s talk about your long-term goals,” and she replies, “you mean paying them back?” and there’s good-natured laughter all around? It’s the kind of ad that makes you wonder if your television screen will blush with shame. I was in debt for several years, and not nearly as much as many college grads, and kids, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy couple of decades. Constantly deferred choices to buy a house, or even move out of your old house. No cars, no luxuries, few investments in the future since you’re so tied to the past, and possibly insufficient healthcare, all so you can have the kind of liberal arts education designed for a middle class with some leisure time … which you’re not going to have. All so that, unless you’re a doctor or engineer or business school grad, you can have that required accreditation for a job that might be there, or might be far in the future or already gone. Meanwhile, according to recent Pew surveys, many millennials are afraid to even get married because of the fragility of their economic situation.

As the song says, you better believe “bright college years” are “the shortest gladdest years” of life if that’s what comes after.

But here’s where the generation that passed through the ‘60s has the most to offer millenials, mainly through traditions of protest and resistance on college campuses. For the youthful stage of boomers and that of millennials may have more in common than first suspected. My guess is that millennials also sense that however much they’re now dominating public taste and are being catered to by parents and corporations (as were we) because they’re such a large generation (as were we) the future will be harshly, even brutally competitive (as we found out when the peace-and-love of the ‘60s became the dog-eat-dog of the ‘80s). And unlike us, millennials will be competing for dwindling economic and planetary resources. Repression of fear and anger stimulated by such abysmal intuitions could very well be another reason for a retreat into app-induced conformity punctuated by episodes of hostility.

But there’s some good news in that actions taken by student rebels on college campuses in the ‘60s can serve as a guide for millennial students seeking a way to liberate themselves from those shadows and channel righteous anger not into sexual or online or other kinds of aggression but into unity in resistance. There are whole new sets of problems, many originating on the college campuses themselves, and of course now one new overwhelming one: how to stop mass shootings of students and bring about gun regulation in the face of an unbelievably obstructive national government. But there may also be solutions found in new incarnations of fifty-year-old movements toward unity and reform.

From Michael Eric Stein’s recent collection, “Fifty Years Ago Today.”

Footnotes

1. Vaughan, Roger, “The Gulf Between Parents and Children,” Life Magazine. 104A–114.
2. Ibid., 104B.
3. Ibid., 114.
4. Ibid., 108.
5. The Invisible War. Directed by Kirby Dick. 2012. Rise Films and ITVS. New York: Cindedigm. DVD. New Video.
6. Don DeLillo. White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985).
7. For a powerful and courageous personal account of that experience in Horace Mann, read Stephen Fife’s The 13th Boy (Seattle: Cune Press, 2015).
8. Nigel Planer and Terence Blacker. Neil’s Book of the Dead (New York: Viking, 1984.)
9. Joel Stein Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation, Time Magazine, May 20, 2013, http://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/, accessed January 2, 2017.
10. Annika Hammerschlag, “Work-Study, Manhattan Style: Thousands of NY Students Turn to Sex Work to Make Ends Meet “ Village Voice, May 17, 2016, www.villagevoice.com/news/work-study-manhattan-style-thousands-of-ny-students-turn-to-sex-work-to-make-ends-meet-8626389, accessed January 2, 2017, and Nancy Jo Sales, “Daddies, ‘Dates,’ and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy,” Vanity Fair, July 7, 2016, www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/07/welcome-to-the-new-prostitution-economy.
11. Alex Gray, “The Troubling Charts That Show Young People Losing Faith In Democracy,” World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/charts-that-show-young-people-losing-faith-in-democracy, Dec. 1, 2016, accessed January 2, 2017, and Amanda Taub, “How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’,” The New York Times, November 29, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html?_r=1, accessed January 2, 2017.
12. Jason Fagone, “The Serial Swatter,” NY Times Magazine, November 24, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatter.html, accessed January 2, 2017.