As a college professor and employer of budding journalists, I spend a lot of time with Millennials. In fact, I spend more time with the rising generation than I do with the, well, falling generation to which I belong â?? the Boomers. And as I listen to my colleagues and students, I hear much that reminds of my own misspent youth and of my contemporaries when we were getting ready to charge out and change the world.
Millennials and Boomers are alike in many ways. Both generations are large: there are so many of us that we developed a stronger identity and culture than most generational cohorts do. Both generations see themselves as both the products and the agents of change. The Boomers grew up during the Civil Rights and the feminist revolution; we were forced to question the guiding assumptions of American society and culture as part of figuring out who we were and what we wanted to do with our lives. Millennials have similar problems; the old assumptions and conventions are falling apart, and Millennials need to think through what it means to live in a much more ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse societies than past generations in the United States remember.
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