We're the best

We are Generation Y, and we’re totally OK.

Allow me to preface this by saying, as a whole, studying generational characteristics and classifying them as such is pretty useless.

I’m a product of my society, but not necessarily my generation. There are fundamental differences between me and people born five years before or after me. Yet, I can relate closely to some people who were born 100 years ago.

But if we’re insisting on making the comparison, Generation Y looks significantly better than the generations that came before us.

We’ve revolutionized mass communication. That’s a four-word sentence that carries a lot of weight.

We’re more educated than any group of people to come before us. And we’ve done this with a handicap — college is astronomically more expensive than it’s ever been, we’re buried in debt and we have little to no job prospects because we’re in a recession that’s really not our generation’s fault.

We have more access to more information than any generation has ever had. That’s partly because we’re the vehicles for the most advanced technology humanity’s ever used.

We’re more accepting of other cultures, races, religions, sexual orientations, genders and other defining human characteristics.

We haven’t started any wars. We haven’t dropped any atomic bombs. We haven’t made concentration camps. We haven’t committed mass genocide, and we sure as hell haven’t called any rapes “legitimate” as elected officials.

We all mess up. We all succeed. Failures and successes are benchmarks for studying generations.

But basing these successes and failures off our generational differences only divides us further and creates more resentment.

We didn’t start the fire, and we definitely aren’t adding more fuel to it.

­— ikehajinaz@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Ike Hajinazarian on Twitter @_IkeHaji.