Finally, I have used that label—the millennials. I have always dreaded the term because it has not refined itself,or rather, the users have grossly employed that notion.
Who are the millennials? There have been, earlier, debates about who are those who fall under that name. Nothing much has been clarified itself to say the negative elements of those born during the turn of the millennia. How the term came about is a mystery. The lack of mystique in the generation that seems to have been defined by the change in the millennium has been oversimplified. As with any simplication, the label that resulted is accessible, fashionable and easy to use.
As with labels, the term “millennials” has provided a handle with which one can, supposedly, understand the generation of today. As with any simplification, the term is simplistic and gross. It is a catch-all term and, as with any concept that appears to cover much and everything, the word millennial does not cover much.
There were those who embraced the term, and there are many who embrace its use. But, when educators who should know better about cohorts and background apply the label, then there lies the danger of ignorance and naïvete.
The favorite whipping boy for the trait of the milliennials is technology. Social media and devices that quickly link individuals create, for those who like the term, a person who has no deliberate sense of emotions.
A few days ago, I had the fancy time to review the film Rebel Without a Cause. With James Dean playing the irascible lead, the story caught and defined that period in the 1950s and 1960s.
Suddenly, all young men were James Dean. They drank liquor and got drunk and caused mayhem. The photographs of Filipino young boys and men that followed the fillm showed the scowl and smirk of James Dean. And there was always that look: you gaze down, tilt your head to the left, and, with your chin not leaving the standing collar of your shirt, you focus your rage on the camera, that intrusive machine aiming to capture all your heartaches about the world.
It was strange viewing the film again. For a cinema that was supposedly ushering the new way of understanding or misunderstanding the youth, the film painted again a gross oversimplification of parenting. The father was arrogant, the mother naïve and the grandmother a virago. Only the local police officer could understand the youthful “rebel.”
Labels lie. We know that from the products we buy each day from the grocery. Shampoo can make you divine; shaving lotion can turn you into sensual devils.
Years ago, I was doing a fieldwork in Southern Luzon in a farm. It was early morning, the first day of the school year. In rural communities where young men and women marry early, a young father, in his teens, had excused himself from the work that day. He was walking to the town to bring his young son to the public school. I remember him telling me how education was important to him.
He was the perfect millennial, but I doubt if he understood the term. He was the rebel with a cause. He promised to fight ignorance with his young son.
The sun was barely peeping through the coconut trees. The world was turning around me and all those who lived in that farm owned by a few families. Across the many islands of this nation struggle, labor and die poor many young men and women born at the turn of the millennium, not knowing what moved, what shifted. The universe does not listen to them because they live in a planet of capital exaggerated over labor and human toil.
For the good educators, the word millennial cannot withstand the test of operational definition. For most of the young men and women in the land, the term millennial does not, with great fortune, make sense at all.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano