Label-Maker:
The Millennial Search
Mid-February 2019
There are times when I go in search of information online and I really shouldn’t. It’s not there. All that I find is a gross narcissistic reflection in the form of words from the author of the blurb. That blurb poses as an Article of Commentary. Commentary is fine if it really opines on a topic in a fair, honest, and accurate way. I know that “fair” and “honest” and “accurate” are loaded words, but you can get the gist of my disgust by attempting to do what I did this morning with any subject matter.
“Immaturity of millennials” were the words I typed into the non-goggled search engine. It was a bit astounding for me to see the on-screen line-up of con-artist “articles” that make a wild stab at informing You, the digital reader, about Them, the people who need to influence your opinion.
Being a writer myself, I understand the need to influence the opinion of another person who is woefully mis-informed. I do not understand the obsession to convince anyone of your slanted, stilted viewpoint, and to use any means necessary:
quotes that aren’t accurately attributed; quotes that have been cherry-picked only to buttress the bias of the author; and quotes that are so circular there is no need to follow the link — and I might add that taking the viewer from the screen-page to another site is not advantageous to the primary site; that person may not return!
The Millennial Search was a curious venture, or adventure, by me to try to understand the problems plaguing a group that has had to deal with a lousy path in life after that nice life and several paths to the future got blown up to smithereens by segments of older generations who turned out to be idiots — but they had always been idiots.
You can’t tell an adolescent just how screwed up the aging hippies were when, as an adolescent, you had to deal with them. You can’t tell an adolescent that the ivory-tower-cottage industry of bilking parents to pay for the Education of their offspring is bankrupting the nation morally. And you can’t tell an adolescent how to grow up before the teen is ready and able to grow up. In fact, you don’t tell a child how to grow up at all. It either happens or it doesn’t.
“Articles” online are a pathetic parade of palaver pushing politics, personal agendas and pansy thoughts about the World-They-Knew. One of the most absurd and annoying “experts” informed me that she is now a Work-At-Home Mother — not a Stay-at-Home mother — because well, she has left her office career to work-in-the-home with her two tykes alongside her. So the womanly worm has turned!
I think we all ought to stick with the label that the 1990s Career Women stuck on to the mothers who devoted their full-time to child-rearing: The Stay-At-Home.
This insulting label created by the Media Mavens got foisted on me, particularly by Career Women attempting a put-down. The Consent Crowd never asked me, or my mom-peers, how we felt about this stupid and inaccurate name-tag. And now the Labelers, the Wanna-be-Influencers (still in the Media) want to change the term from “stay-at-home” to “work-at-home” to suit them. (Yes, I hyphenate adjectival terms. In this instance, it’s my way of making my mark on something imposed on me.)
In all honesty, I’d not even heard of this ridiculous label until I received, long-distance, in the mail, the Official Questionnaire for my 20th High School Reunion. (Disclaimer: I’ve never been to any public reunion of anything, and don’t plan to.) One question was whether I was a stay at home mom. The discourtesy of this inquiry was minimal compared to: Married? How many times?
When a person hails from New Jersey, that sort of tacky directness is to be expected. The “stay at home mom” designation, however, was new to me. And then, once introduced to it, I couldn’t seem to escape it!
Decades ago, The Stay-at-Homes raised a lot of the Millennials who are currently doing just fine alongside those spoiled brat Millennials with whom we all must contend. The mature Millennials were the first ones who had to deal with the immature Millennials — every step along the millennial way — from pre-schools that were really daycare-centers, to noisy, chaotic elementary school classrooms, to college classes replete with the whiney brats demanding to “negotiate” with the professor for a better grade.
We stay-at-home moms were treated like dirt by those brats and their uppity mothers who somehow could not belly up to the truth about what it takes to be a mature child, a mature woman, a mature anything. Hissy-fit girls in the bodies of grown women are nothing new on the face of the planet.
How messed-up is any woman who feels she must somehow over-delineate her self-definition away, far far away, from the lot of the Chief Cook, Bottle-washer and Tea-Maker of previous generations? Home-making has always been a legitimate job in the home. What in the world is wrong with any woman who feels she must prove — to anyone, but, above all, to herself — that she is earning her keep while she is keeping the job of the most sacred and necessary duty on earth — the nurturing and protection of a child?!
I am all too sadly reminded of a friend whose child-bearing years coincided with mine. She blithely informed people that she’d left her career to get a Master’s Degree: she certainly wasn’t a stay-at-home with her children. Lying at the start of your mothering career is an inauspicious beginning, and a real shame for anyone involved in that enterprise.
Lying online has become the natural climate of the enterprise called the Internet. It’s a real shame because the digital era still holds so much promise. Within that promise has emerged the vulgarity of the hucksters that can haunt any profitable enterprise. Separating the wheat from the chaff has become part of any online search, be it for data, dresses, dog collars or digital images. Duck-Duck-Go is my way to go, but many are the times when I’d much rather drive to a library or a store and hunt for the real thing! Alas, those things no longer exist!
Faulty generalizations only get more general and more faulty as the amount of inaccurate information increases, especially on the Internet. Why, I even read one “article” penned by a person who claimed to be a Millennial — born in 1981. I’d thought that Group was Gen X, or was it Gen Y? Don’t ask me why!
Before long, we’ll all be Millennials! And so, in the spirit of the non-Millennial, I am going to confine my information-searches to thinking out loud!
