Millennials

Originally Posted Saturday, March 8, 2014

Millennials.  I love them.  They are more everything than the generations that came before.  They are bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, prettier. . . . They are post-racial.  They are connected.  I was talking with the girl in this picture the other night.  Remember 9-11?  She was seven.  You know the impact it had on you?  Not her.  Oh, it has its impact, of course, but not in the same way.  Pick a twenty-something off the street.  Just grab one by the arm and ask him or her what the defining cultural moment was in his/her life.  They are poor.  They get by on less than their parents did at their age.  They are in debt up to their eyebrows.  Remember how bad things looked for Generation X?  It looks like a 24/7 party to them.  They are more liberal than you are.  They are less well-read.  They are less likely to cling to the voodoo that drove their parents and their parent's parents.  They don't have health insurance.  They aren't as affiliated with political parties. 

O.K.  That's enough with the generalizations.  You can look this stuff up for yourself, or you can read this article from today's N.Y. Times. 

Which brings me to this.  Belle Knox, the Duke University Porn "Star."  She is not a star yet, but surely she is on her way. 

I've chosen to post a pretty picture of her.  She's cute.  She's eighteen.  She is well-spoken.  She is a Millennial.  I have a weakness for her and her ilk.  And, of course, I would love to make pictures with her.  But it is her attitude that fascinates me.  She wants to be a women's rights attorney, she says.  She wants to liberate the world from its fear of nudity.  I'm glad she is doing it now.  When she gets to be my age, such a thing would be reprehensible. 

Driving home yesterday, I was three cars back at a stop sign.  Nobody was going.  Two boys, one black, one white, were having a fistfight.  A big group of kids were standing around them, cheering.  They were from the ninth grade center down the street, and they were pretty good.  The white kid was taller and thinner than the thicker black kid.  They both could hit and take a punch.  They had skills.  It was pretty impressive.  I was going to break it up, but I am ashamed to say that I was a bit hypnotized by it all.  Just as I opened my door to get out, a black man in his seventies got out of his car and walked in between them.  I was worried for him, but the boys were probably getting tired and neither of them had a clear advantage, so they both might have been relieved.  Their faces were bloodied and already beginning to swell.  I hate to say it, but I grew up this way.  There were big fights after school often enough.  I was in a few.  I knew the feeling of walking away immediately afterwards, heart still charging, already reliving the punches, thinking of what you might have done differently, the bumps on your face feeling ten times bigger than they are.  For Millenials, some things are still the same. 

I prefer Belle's rebellion, of course, but truth is there will always be both.  The Ahabs of the world want to rid the cosmos of evil, and they will take the whole crew down with them in their hellish pursuit of Moby Dick.  They are the scary ones.  They have a deep-seated hatred in them.  They are vile and villainous to their rotten little cores.  There are no solutions to what the world is made of.  The world is not a problem to be solved.  All we can do is navigate it and hope we can help it out in some way. 

The world is just wild at heart and weird on top.  Really. . . all there is to do is love.