WTF is wrong with our young people??

[NNadir]

243. Oh I see.

Unless students are all "huddled" in the library on Friday night, the Millennial generation consists of bar hopping pieces of shit.

You know this because you teach at a university, a major one, and you are checking up on those awful lazy Millennials to see if they meet your standards of decency, when you're not patrolling the streets to see if they're in bars.

By contrast, in their time, the baby boomers were in the library all hours of the night, in your imagination, studying engineering and science, and it's entirely not their fault that in 1965 the annual concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 320.04 ppm and um, in 2019 it was 411.44 ppm.

Don't worry. Be happy. It's not your problem.

I am a baby boomer and, much to my regret, I recall the pieces of shit in my generation all huddled in the mud, smoking dope, listening to a bored Grace Slick sing "White Rabbit" for the 10,000th time, when they were in their late teens and early 20's.

As it happens, because I have a 9 to 6, sometimes to 7 job, I am thus often in libraries on off hours...Friday nights, Wednesday nights...Saturday mornings, Saturday evenings, Sunday evenings...

Of course, there are times that these buildings are nearly empty, since those awful millennials, who are not as good as we are, sometimes need to sleep, especially those putting in long hours at menial jobs to pay their tuition when they don't have time to be in the library.

They don't need sleep as much as they need to live up to our expectations.

These kids are emerging from major universities with tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, some of which goes to pay the salaries of the bar patrol to make sure they are never having fun, never drinking to bury what must be fear, at least for the most cognizant of them, of the world we leave for them, that world where hundreds of billions of tons of heavy metal laden fossil fuels has been vaporized because we baby boomers all needed our cars, our stereos, our tv sets, our McMansions.

Now the major university that my son attends is known informally as a "work hard, party hard" school, although the "party hard" kids are not engineering and science students.

There are two kinds of people who grow up with their parents, assuming some baby boomer asshole hasn't separated them from their parents and put them in a cage, those who emulate their parents and those who improve upon their parents. My son tells me that the "party hard" types are emulating their parents, um, business majors.

Our generation has certainly set an example, haven't we?

The kids I know, however, overall are certainly improving on their parents generation. My son shares a house with five students living in it, four engineering students and one physics student. These kids are simply amazing.

Now of course, this is an anecdotal case, but here is a photograph, taken at random, off the internet, of that famous rock festival that was the pinnacle of our generation's rise to "adulthood" the "peace and love" festival at Woodstock:



The photograph is from the collection of photographs by the photographic journalist Burk Uzzle at the University of North Carolina.

Uzzle Buzz: Woodstock, Flag Pants, and Rolling Stone

Here's what I think of my generation: We never cleaned up those boxes of empty beer cans, plastic bottles, paper, etc. Never. We instead expanded that entire scene to fill the whole world, the oceans, the lakes, the rivers, the land, the cities, after vaporizing some of it to fill the planetary atmosphere with garbage.

Here is a picture of a "pristine" beach in Hawaii, Kahilo Beach on the main Island, an uninhabited beach.



Taking the measure of Hawaii's beaches.

We can of course, swap anecdotal stuff all day long, your bar patrols in the town outside your major university that depends on the debt of millennials to exist, my comparitive photographs of Woodstock and the modern Hawaiian beaches and debate whether, "We are golden, we are star dust," we Baby Boomers, when compared to those awful Millennials. These photographs, nevertheless, are a part of the legacy of the Baby Boomer generation. This is what we will leave to history.

OK Boomer?

We only see that at which we look, and we choose the things at which we look. It is true that I suffer from "selection pressure," when I look at these kids. But again, and again, and again, they impress me, those I see, admittedly by choice. I am hopefully not in toto a representative of my generation, which I abhor after a lifetime - a long lifetime - of experiencing them. I'm in the libraries to read scientific papers (generally) related to engineering and scientific articles on the environmental state of the world and possible engineering solutions that all future generations will require, and the cost of intense deprivation and expense, to clean up our mess. As I do this work, there are often sets of these wonderful young people in the room with me.

Two nights ago, I attended a fascinating lecture at a, um, major university, by an "under 30" person on the subject of measuring the aggregation states of proteins in solution by processing the methyl signals in 1D NMR. To me that guy represents the rising generation.

I am honored to be around these young people, who will, regrettably, have the legacy of cleaning up for the generation that elected Ronald Reagan, two George Bushs and, um, oh, baby boomer Donald Trump to the Presidency.

It's been a pleasure to chat. History will not forgive us, nor should it.