By Jamil Oakford/editor-in-chief
Feb. 3 marked an interesting day on the trending topic sidebar on Twitter. #MillennialBillofRights, a topic that trended for at least two hours and climbed rapidly after it began, seemed to touch on all the plights millennials would face in their short lifespan.
“Right to go home w full pay when phone battery runs down to 10%,” one user wrote.
Countermoonbat tweeted, “Right to complain about not finding a job with my $60,000 Indigenous Transgender Studies degree.”
Most of the tweets were satirical in nature, but some took the trending topic as a way of touching on bigger issues.
One user tweeted that millennials should have the right to live free of ridicule, calling the previous generation lazy and entitled and accusing them of ruining the economy.
While practically the entire world and every generation that came before us tells millennials they complain too much, are entitled and lazy, it’s hard for members of the newest generation to have hurt feelings.
In fact, the previous generations have aided in making millennials feel ashamed of bearing the title.
Instead, we’re forced to sit as “The Greatest Generation” is droned on about over and over while overlooking the fact that segregation still existed under their watch.
Baby boomers tote their supremacy while millennials are expected to forget that many of the members of their generation who found power invented derivatives and sold bad mortgages that led to the Wall Street collapse in 2008.
Yes, millennials may be self-absorbed, unfocused at times and come off as entitled, but what is a generation to do when they’ve been sold a dream that’s no longer possible? A college degree isn’t a promised thing anymore, and debt-free living isn’t possible.
The generations before us were great because they came up with things that helped elevate the people of that time. And people from these same generations have found ways of preventing later generations from bettering themselves.
Millennials are hardly lazy or entitled.
If entitled means we want to finish college without being $50,000 or more in debt, and we want hospital visits to be covered by the government like our counterparts in Canada and western Europe, then yeah, sure. The first millennials are barely aged 30. Give us time to grow and learn.
We’re a generation that feels as though we’ve got nothing to look forward to except for years of stress, mountains of debt and a bunch of stacked decks on the path paved for us by previous generations.
