“None of these young people want to work today. They’re lazy,” a friend at my favorite coffee shop recently asserted. “They’re ignorant. They don’t know a thing about history, and they never read books,” a phone friend has told me several times in conversation. “They’re all a bunch of snowflakes,” another friend said a couple of months ago. “They can’t take criticism. Some of them even take their moms with them to job interviews.”

Like me, two of these friends are baby boomers, the guy on the phone hails from the Silent Generation. And every time these men or anyone else makes such a blanket statement about the younger generation, the millennials or the Gen Z crew, I feel as if they’re living in some alternative universe.

In a sense, they are. They take their impressions of the men and women in their 20s and 30s from some news story or poll, then resort to universal generalizations, labeling an entire generation with some tag or another while ignoring nuance altogether. They read a headline like this one “Gen Z—the first generation officially dubbed dumber than the last,” and decide that everyone born between 1997 and 2012 is a dolt.

Neither the news they read nor their opinions agree with what I see with my own eyes. My four children, millennials all, are married, and along with their spouses work hard, own their own homes, and have children. In the town where I live are many of their friends, a good number of whom match these same criteria commonly used to define success. Some of these friends aren’t married or don’t have children, but nonetheless they possess ambition and the skills to fulfill ambition’s desires.

My Gen Z friends and acquaintances are fewer in number, but like the millennials they are renegades from the stats assigned the group ages 14-29. Three of my grandchildren are attending college with academic financial aid and are by all accounts succeeding. Another is working full-time in an attorney’s office, and a fifth, just graduated from high school, is looking for work.

By the time he graduates from high school in a few months, one young man I know will have learned welding and carpentry skills, and already has a full-time job waiting for him. A 22-year-old who recently graduated from college is already an excellent editor – I speak from the experience of working with her on a project – and while looking for work she’s cobbled together makeshift jobs that are bringing her a tidy sum of money. I could name half-a-dozen other “kids” I know doing these same things.

Now let’s look at the other side of generational divide.

Articles appear online negatively critiquing my fellow baby boomers for sucking up too many resources from social services – Social Security, for instance, or Medicare – while also sitting on much of the nation’s wealth. True statistically, but not for anyone looking at my bank account. I love what I do to earn a living, but whatever happens, a living I must earn to survive. And for those who would remain unconvinced that huge numbers of boomers lack deep pockets, I’d invite them to sit on my front porch for an hour or so at any time of day and watch the men and women broken by want and poverty pass by. Or for that matter, I simply point to those who think boomers are rolling in dough to visit their local grocery store or Walmart and look at the folks manning some of the cash registers or stocking the shelves.

Our society is broken by divisions of race, wealth, gender, class, and yes, age. Yet if we compare what’s reported via pollsters and the mainstream media to the evidence of our eyes, we see time and again that we are deceived. Whether that deception is intentional or not, it doesn’t fly in the real world. Most of us live, for instance, as if a person’s character matters more than skin pigmentation, a belief in equality which some commentators nonetheless declare racist.

These trumped-up divisions are canyons built without bridges and are dangerous to our nation’s welfare. They exacerbate our problems rather than move toward solutions.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a little-known poem, “We and They,” about the differences between the British and those whom they’d colonized. Below is the last stanza. Put the words in context today, and they apply to us:

All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They.

Let’s ditch the divisions and start looking at our fellow citizens as souls rather than stats.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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