After returning from yesterday's "March For Our Lives," and watching all the speakers I missed on television, I was troubled by a conviction I've held for almost a decade. “According to the authors [of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, William Strauss and Neil Howe], Millennials could emerge as the next ‘Great Generation.’"
I’ve been waiting to see them rise to reverse the conservative direction we have been heading in since the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s.
Why have Millenials not been a counter force to date, but Generation Z have just emerged as such and promised to continue? In the 1960’s young people, subject to the first draft since WWII, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, which many thought was being promoted by what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, and resulted in the deaths of almost 50,000 “boomers.” The end of the Vietnamese War meshes closely with the birth of the millennial generation, not subject to a draft and relatively gun-free (about 130 million guns in the US in 1975).
In 1999, shortly after the birth of Generation Z, when there were about 240 million guns in the US, we experienced the Columbine High School massacre. In 1998, the gun lobby spent about $4 million on lobbying in Washington (which has risen to about $15 million in 2013) and now the number of guns in the US is over 350 million and 141 have been killed in school massacres. Is it no wonder that the students of Generation Z, having experienced yet another massacre have chosen to take to the streets when Millenials haven’t?
