We The Young People

My first thought as my bus from DC to NYC came into the city the other night was “Grilled Cheesus Crust, I can finally get off this bus!” My butt had been numb since Delaware.

Whenever I hear someone say something like “Jesus Christ, you scared me!” or something along those lines, I always have a moment where I think about a cartoon Jesus hiding around a dark corner and popping out and scaring someone before laughing hysterically, or a creepy Jesus in a trench coat flashing people in the park.

Religion is one of those things they say it’s not polite to talk about in an interview, on a date, or out in public. I don’t know when we all got so sensitive, maybe it’s just always been that way. When someone says something that you don’t agree with, religion-wise, it certainly isn’t a personal attack on you and all you stand for. And if it were me making the statement and it WAS a personal attack on you and all you stand for...you’d KNOW it.

Something many people get wrong is that the United States was not discovered and settled as a land of freedom of religion. The Puritans came here to escape religious persecution in England, where Catholicism was the reigning religion, and England at that time believed that there MUST be uniformity of religion for a given society to thrive. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and this it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, by force when necessary, in the interest of saving everyone’s souls. The Protestants actually agreed with that, they just thought Catholicism needed reform, and to become more like Protestantism.  

So the Puritans came to the New World, not so that anyone could believe in whatever they wanted, but so that they could specifically believe in Protestantism, away from persecution from the Catholic leaders.

I feel like my generation is the one with the power to change the world. We are large in number, we scream for tolerance and change, and Generations X and Y was the first generations to be raised during the rise and rapid evolution of technology. We were among the first to be able to access the entire world and a wealth of information.

Today’s teenagers and young adults are spoiled from the ridiculous amount of technology and information at our fingertips. Who needs to remember numbers or how to do simple math when we can just use our phones and calculators? Who needs to actually read the classics when you can just Wikipedia the detailed summary? And why do people find it odd that I love to read for pleasure and don’t really get into video games? But whether we are spoiled, entitled, or just misunderstood in a changing world, we can change everything.

There are more people in Generation X and Y than there are in the Baby Boomer generation. The Baby Boomers are the ones currently holding office, holding the high level CEO jobs in a lot of companies, and are a lot of the ones making policies that affect our lives.

Imagine what we can do. We can literally change the world. We already have!

More young people voted in 2008 and 2012 than ever before. We voted, and it just goes to show that your vote DOES matter. Your vote helped change the direction our country was going in. Generations X and Y (Y is sometimes referred to as the Millennial Generation or the ‘Me Generation’) have live tweeted catastrophes, such as in Egypt and Israel, they have demanded information, they have found vigilante justice on the internet.

We have built social networks that literally connect the world, we believe in starting something from nothing, and we know that with the right idea, anything is possible. Our generation created Google and eBay, we have Facebook and Twitter to unite people globally at the touch of a button, we made the Hubble telescope, and the biggest strides in space exploration.

Our generation are the ones who are fighting for LGBT rights, for equal constitutional rights of them to be married. We follow in the footsteps of every Civil Rights movement in our history, which proves over and over again that we the people know what we want, and what is right, and are willing to yell and fight and work for it.

Jeff Gordinier, author of X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking, has a pretty awesome quote from when he was featured in Time magazine. Here is a short excerpt that includes it:

‘Shirking the media myth that Xers are slackers, Gordinier argues that Generation X has — to borrow a '60s term — changed the world. Citing Gen-X icons like Quentin Tarantino and Jon Stewart, along with Gen-X triumphs like Google, YouTube, and Amazon, among others, Gordinier argues that not only are Xers far from over, they might be the most unsung and influential generation of all time. "Gen-X stomping grounds of the past — the espresso bar, the record shop, the thrift store — have been resurrected in digital form. The new bohemia is less a place than it is a headspace. It's flexible enough to bypass all the old binaries. It encompasses mass and class, mainstream and marginal, yuppie and refusenik, gearhead and Luddite. It's everywhere and nowhere in particular," he writes.

In short, "GenXers are doing the quiet work of keeping America from sucking."’

(read the rest of the article here)

So, rejoice, young people. We are changing the world, we are the future, blahblahblah.

Seriously, we have the interconnectedness, the tolerance, and the ability to learn, grow, and change the entire world and how it works. We are not in the Hunger Games, we are not in The Giver or Divergent. We are not yet dystopian, but we are the future.