Said it before and I’ll say it again:
Expect more strikes and union demands as #Millennials and their team-we-us energy travels with them as they age. (They’re 41 at the top end this year, 18 at the bottom.) Can you even imagine Gen Xers rallying and demanding more support, rights and protections for their generation? Hah. Never. (Or rare and uninspired if at all.)
#Boomer youth–despising, hateful and angry at the mainstream, middle-class, majoritarian world their parent-generation (GIs) so diligently created–allowed and even celebrated the destruction of the middle class.
Millennials, their opposite/shadow/reversing generation, i.e. the generation of children on which they have the most influence, swings in the opposite direction: desiring, pining for and fighting for “the right to a middle-class existence.” Millennials are the ultimate Common Man, Average Joe generation.
Boomers are the atomizers, the break-into-pieces, the smash-the-system generation. Millennials swing in the other direction. When Millennials are in midlife (mid 40s to mid 60s) their child-generation, the one on which they will have the most influence, will, yet again, as they come of age and rise into young adulthood, want to destroy the highly functioning yet ever-so-bland world their Millennial parents create.
Today’s strikes and the increasing calls for unionization, workers’ rights, and so on are a reflection of the deep, alternating, 45-ish-year cycles of cultural renewal and civic renewal operating in the backdrop of society, our nation, our lives.
