These images were circulating on the Internet. The caption stated:
http://www.businessinsider.com/category/millennials this is such an interesting battle in tonal shifts of “ungrateful millennials” and “ways we’re exploiting millennials” and “7 sexy tips to degrade and humiliate your milennial into submission” and “why your milennials are leaving you”
This is my response:
When they’re talking about millenials, they really mean the off-spring of white affluent baby boomers and/or descendants. And while this group might be less prosperous than their parents, we should perhaps step back and question whether their parents wealth was ever deserved in the first place.
I would argue that the prosperity of the privileged among our parents’ generation was the product of exploitation on an international scale. In the twentieth century through colonialism, and then through flexing our might that was only gained through the lottery of history. I would maintain that globalization has acted as an equalizer for this. That the more we created disparities between different economies, the greater the push back as the global community started to get smaller and smaller.
But this doesn’t speak to practices that serve to exploit our own in order to artificially maintain the level of comfort this privileged class has come accustomed to. Like using free labour via unpaid internships, reducing taxes by making the young pay for more of their own post-secondary while simultaneously making it a quasi-requirement for many jobs that don’t even need it, putting downward pressure on minimum wages, and cutting benefits for new entrants. Policies that target the young and other new arrivals to this game that have it much tougher, like immigrants and those re-entering the work force.
Because that’s how power works. Those who have it serve themselves, and go so far as to eat their own young – even if such acts aren’t recoverable, and have a permanent effect on future prosperity. The young don’t have power, so they get exploited.
But perhaps worse of all is that all the young who are targeted now, will only gladly take hold of whatever power they do garner so that they can repeat the process all over again to the next generation.
Because they think, erroneously, that they deserve it.