We have betrayed this generation in that way, and these millennials will not soon forget that. Remarkably, I seldom hear even an echo of bitterness from them. They are determined to make their way with or without us. As one student with a challenging childhood told me, “I’m the one who got away, and I am not going to waste this one shot.”
So many of us college-educated Americans fail to see how, even in 2017 America, our degrees make us luckier than most. I don’t mean to suggest that life is always better if you go to college, but it sure can change whom you see in the mirror every day. So much of life is a head game.
These students. I’ve known all along that our time together came with a deadline. This was the deal, from the beginning. Yet here I am, contemplating their departure – many of them are graduating – with the heavy heart of the mother I guess I will always be.
No one prepared me for this part of teaching. Certainly, my colleagues shared stories of the work they love, the students who lay claim to their hearts. But that’s a little bit like listening to someone talking about her marriage. Until you’re in it, you’re just a bystander.
I’m all in now. This semester, I taught feature writing and ethics. We demand a lot of our students, and they are more than up to the challenge. If there’s anything I’ve learned about millennials, particularly in the wake of last year’s presidential election, it’s that they’ll match us wit for wit, and most of them have zero patience for hypocrisy.
Theirs is the generation of transparency and accountability, the inevitable outcome of growing up with Google and the rest of the internet at their fingertips. Week after week, they bring an unsparing eye to a world in which too many in my generation dismiss them as entitled and self-absorbed.
Nothing will make us irrelevant faster, my fellow baby boomers, than underestimating millennials, who now outnumber what remains of us.
For months now – for about 100 days, to be more precise – I’ve grown slowly but steadily more optimistic about our country’s future, despite the sense of gloom that overtook me on election night and sometimes still hovers. As I near the end of this semester, I understand better why that is.
Week after week, I am surrounded by our country’s future journalists, filmmakers and documentarians. Every time our president tries to mislead the country or demonize our profession, the majority of them are emboldened.
In word and deed, their message is clear: Take heart, America. We are here.
Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and the author of two books. Reach her at con.schultz@yahoo.com. © 2017 Creators.com
