The Invisible Counterpoint

Tim Donovon wrote: There is a demographic group in crisis today, though they’re rarely discussed. Occasionally, they’re used as a foil on conservative cable news shows, where overpaid hosts sneer derisively at their endemic “laziness.” Sometimes, members of Congress will  trot them out as straw men  to drum up support in rural districts. These are not  your struggling baristas with their undergraduate degrees  and mountains of debt, or your  former-newsmen-turned-retail-drones . They’re not “overeducated and underemployed.” No, this demographic group, the  under educated and underemployed, are in far more dire straits. This subset of millennials might not look like the “Gen Y” that’s commonly portrayed in the media — this site included. They aren’t the duck-faced “ Rich Kids of Instagram ,” the Lena Dunhams or the Mark Zuckerbergs that we use as generational stand-ins (rather than, say, wealthy and successful millennials Le...

How do you make fun of a highly tech-savvy demographic while trying to dodge the inevitable backlash? Simple: you couch your criticism in terms that seem to come from some other place, while eventually circling around to mark your real target. Brooke Donatone followed this formula to the letter with a recent article at Slate titled “ Why Millennials Can’t Grow Up. ” Rather than write just another screed about millennials’ legendary self-obsession, Donatone chooses to hurl invective at “helicopter parents,” and their supposedly deleterious effect on the mental health of their millennial children. This rhetorical flourish is little more than a fig leaf for what is fundamentally just another crude hatchet job against roughly 76 million Americans. In her article, Donatone merrily skips toward the conclusion that a generation of over-parenting has produced a group of people who cannot “do laundry and homework on the same day.” Apparently unable to conceive of any legiti...