How often have we all heard that we are a hopeless generation filled with kids who have had everything served to them on a silver platter? Too many times. As students, we are told time and time again that we are living the best years of our lives. It is our time to do what we want and go crazy. I wonder if the generation before us knows how hard we all are working. Most people take on a full course load, while having a job and a social life as well as being involved in extracurricular activities.
At the same time, some of us are bringing home a huge amount of debt because college is extremely expensive. We are trying to find out what we are going to do once we graduate and enter the real world. We need to find the time to apply to graduate school or jobs. The problem is that the jobs require experience, and nowadays you can’t get experience without having experience. It’s a huge struggle.
When we’re not freaking out about the real world, we are in class — hearing about how horrible the economy is, how hard it is to get a job and how there is basically no hope for us. We are living in a time where the college degrees that we are working so hard for are starting to hold the same weight of a high school diploma. Instead of looking at how “lazy” we are, we should look at what our generation has lived through so far.
We have had soldiers fight for our country in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We helped to elect the first black president, and saw leaps and bounds in the fight for women’s rights. We survived the “end of the world” according to the Mayan calendar. One of the most important things we’ve done is fight for gay rights for the first time in American history. We’ve seen so much happen to America for the worse, but we still fight to save it. We’ve lived through terrorist attacks, and the heartbreak that came with them. We helped build the technological age that we are now in. We contributed to saving the planet, and we have lived through one of the worst economic depressions. We are fighters, and I think that it’s time that Generation Y stops getting a bad reputation.
There are so many people and events that have made an impact on our world for the better. While the generation before us might not understand the technology and the way our generation works, they are incorrect about a lot of their assumptions. So next time someone wants to call us “lazy” and a “bad generation,” just remember that we are the exact opposite.