Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us<br />To those of us who have lived with certain grim realities our whole adult lives — the widening moat between the rich<br />and the rest of us, the sclerotic influence of money on politics, the N. R.A.’s unassailable coalition of greed and fear — they seem like facts of life as unalterable as death itself.<br />Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me<br />that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths.<br />Those kids have suddenly understood how little their lives were ever worth to the people in power.<br />Despite all our competitive parenting and mommy machismo<br />and trophy kids, we don’t really give a damn about our children — by which I mean, about one another’s.<br />I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you’re in the wrong, because you’re going to die and they’ll get to write history, but I just can’t help noticing<br />that the liberal side isn’t much fun to be on anymore.<br />Like most people in middle age, I regard young people with suspicion.<br />The young — and the young at mind — tend to be uncompromising absolutists.<br />Kids don’t have money and can’t vote, and until now burying a few dozen a year has apparently been a price<br />that lots of Americans were willing to pay to hold onto the props of their pathetic role-playing fantasies.<br />Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them.
