I worry our generation has been overexposed to crisis. Rather, we have built up a dangerously high crisis tolerance. The government shutdown, the debt ceiling, Iraq, Afghanistan, the bailout, Florida recounts in 2000, Miley and her foam finger. While this column could quickly devolve into a new verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” what I’m really curious about is what happens when we actually have to respond to a pressing national situation? Will we even care or grasp the seriousness of it? It’s a question to which I hope we never find out the answer but one still worth considering.
I’m not saying the national events mentioned above were not serious, but they certainly were not times that qualified as grave or dire. I’m talking about crisis with a capital C. I’m talking about times like the Cuban Missile Crisis (notice the capital C). What this country has been dealing with for the last while has been a series of small to medium potatoes blown out of proportion by an inordinate amount of media attention turned unwarranted public panic. If the sky is always falling, what are we to do when the sky actually threatens to crumble? Just like the now phased-out Homeland Security Advisory System, threat levels “red” and “orange” lose their urgency after an extended length of time. Not every news story is “breaking,” and not every cat stuck in a tree requires a helicopter and full news team coverage. Constantly being fed messages by cable news pundits and Baby Boomers — often found conveniently in the same talking head — about how it’s the “end of America as you know it” trains my generation to ignore and brush off real messages of urgency and plays into clichéd generational tropes.
My generation has come of age in a time of not one but two wars, yet for a huge portion of us it didn’t directly affect our daily lives. According to the Pew Research Center, just two percent of Millennials are veterans compared to six percent of our parents’ generation and 13 percent of our grandparents’ at the same time in their lives. With perhaps two or three very large exceptions made in the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan and the recession (fingers crossed) most of the so-called crises have worked themselves out one way or another, so why bother getting invested?
Maybe I’m wrong. Hopefully, there will be no serious crisis my generation will be forced to confront. Maybe the Millennials will luck out and coast along under the assumption that in time the problem will resolve itself. Maybe shrugging and mumbling about it all being okay will suffice, because when people start to freak out they usually get over it, right? This year, Millennials are 18 at the youngest and 33 at the oldest. So maybe it’s just our age.