100% wrong. I don’t advocate any of that nonsense, either. Why should “safe spaces” be treated any differently?
What “over-sensitivity” did previous generations display? For example, people who grew up in the 1980’s?
Do you have a cite?
Lenny Bruce got busted in Chicago for supposedly making fun of the Pope.
TV couples were shown in twin beds to preserve the purity of the population.
The sensitive ones were in charge, so only pinkos objected to this nonsense.
I think you mean I was 100% right to “hope that you are equally dismissive of the nonsense advocated” by that other vast phalanx of whiners.
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I don’t advocate any of that nonsense, either. Why should “safe spaces” be treated any differently?
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:dubious: Are you kidding? Concepts like “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” don’t get anywhere near the popular advocacy, attention and respect that concepts like “War on Christmas”, “traditional marriage”, and the other perennial subjects of conservative whinery constantly receive.
Trigger-warning advocates are minuscule groups of earnest college students petitioning their deans for campus policy changes. “Anti-gay discrimination in the name of religious freedom” advocates, on the other hand, are large voting blocs ignorantly demanding and achieving actual legislation which courts then have to waste money and effort on striking down because it’s blatantly unconstitutional.
If you think that “touchy-feely crybaby” millennials are getting “coddled” in their oversensitivity, just take a look at the vastly more massive militant oversensitivity that hordes of privilege-coddled conservatives are laboring to inflict upon the world.
In the 1960’s, not the 80’s.
Yeah, in the 50’s and 60’s, and maybe the early 70’s.
What is the reason for this over-sensitive nonsense in 2016?
I grew up in the 1980’s, and I remember, for example, the 1991-92 Murphy Brown flap where large swathes of conservatives were vocally outraged that a sitcom character (!) chose to become a single mother.
I also remember the widespread controversy when President Clinton in 1993 undertook to repeal the ban on homosexuals serving in the military. That was the origin of the compromise “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, in which you couldn’t get discharged for being gay as long as nobody knew about it. :rolleyes:
Public breastfeeding was another thing many people were very sensitive about (and a lot of people still are, of course).
Oh, and of course “dirty” or profane expressions were considered much more taboo and offensive then than they are now, including “piss”, “fart” and “crap”.
But of course, since that was the climate we grew up in, we didn’t think of it as us being oversensitive: that was simply where the lines of acceptable behavior happened to be drawn.
Sometimes the trend of acceptability reverses direction. I’m sure my (white) grandmother born in 1898, if she were still with us, would think I was terribly squeamish about the “n-word”.
Because, as I noted, every stage and aspect of society has things they’re uncomfortable about and things that are controversial. In 2016 we are way more uncomfortable about racial slurs and raping drugged women than we were thirty or forty years ago, but we don’t consider that being “over-sensitive”.
I’m referring to things which have already been mentioned in this thread, such as the “war on Christmas” beat-up.
Those who are demanding “safe spaces” today are actually limited in what they demand; they just demand that there be some place or places where they won’t have their sensibilities outraged. Whereas the “war on Christmas” warriers were demanding that the public square should become a safe space for them - the media, local governments, business operators, etc, all had to conform to their expectionations about how Christmas should be marked and spoken of.
Of course, we don’t really know how representative safe-spacers are of their generation, and we don’t really know how representative Christimas warriors are of their generation. But if we are seeking to make the case that millenials are uniquely sensitive, uniquely entitled, I’m just not seeing evidence for that. Previous generations may have had slightly different sensitivities, but as far as I can see they were at least as capable as millenials of manifesting a sense of entitlement about them.
I’m 43, and I’ll say that my millennial co-workers are on the whole, delightful.
But, they have a sort of “I want it all!” sort of mentality that us slightly older farts got crushed out of us somewhere as teenagers. I remember hearing “Life’s not fair” and “Suck it up” and many equivalents growing up, along with a constant refrain of the notion that if you’re trying out for the football team / getting a job or whatever else, that they’ll put you where they need you, and that just because you want to be a quarterback/IT specialist/systems architect, it doesn’t mean that you won’t end up a guard/PC support and part-time cable monkey. And that if I wanted to be on the team, or to keep the job, the right way to go about it was to work hard and try and move up/out.
There was also a pretty strong notion that working hard was how to get ahead, and that to a large degree, sacrifice for your job was part of that, and part of providing for your family. And a large dose of the idea that you’ll be broke at first in your entry level job until you get raises/promotions enough to not be broke was had as well.
Now I don’t necessarily agree with all that, especially now that I’m in the working world and have had my eyes opened to just how companies will use up hard workers and accept those sacrifices without appropriate compensation. But I think the Millennials are the far side of that pendulum swing- most of them I’ve met seem to nurse some residual butt-pain about working somewhere uncool, having little money, and being expected to work hard and put their jobs first, instead of their social lives and dreams, be that for good or ill.
In other words, I think the paradigm of getting a job, working hard, and hopefully getting raises and promotions as a center tenet of their lives isn’t deeply attractive to them. They take the whole notion of “work/life balance” very seriously, with the idea of balance being more central than most companies really feel it is. Where most companies and older generations seem to have the idea that work/life balance really means “Don’t work so much or so hard that you go crazy or break down, but work still comes first.”, the Millenials have a more (IMO) healthy notion that work is something that fits into your life as a very important aspect, but not the only, or even the most important aspect.
This changes the script somewhat- if you aren’t looking at your job as the most important thing, it changes who has the power in that relationship, and companies generally aren’t too fond of workers that they don’t have over a barrel in some way.
I do think the Millennials need better PR; what most of them seem to be asking for isn’t unreasonable, but it does demand a certain different mindset on the part of the companies-a recognition that their workers are there because they WANT to be, as much as HAVE to be would be a start, and that’s definitely not the case today.
I blame parenting.
Hell, the Vice President of the United States publicly castigated the show.
Does no one remember the Janet Jackson nipple incident? It wasn’t people born in 1988 making a fuss over that.
Oh, you want the 1980s? Fine; when MTV launched in 1981, it resisted the controversial idea of… playing videos by black musicians. If you don’t believe me, look it up. That’s rather oversensitive, I’d say.
Examples of even earlier generations. Don’t remember that much of the '80s, though I think people freaked about disrespect to the flag. But most of the sensitivities of older generations affected far more people than those of today. Unless you are a professor teaching literature that might disturb someone, who cares what some people on college campuses do?
Older Millennials were raised by Boomers, later Millennials by GenXers. The current crop of helicopter parents (for the past 10 years or so) are GenXers and Millennials. Those kids are NOT Millennials.
I do agree with bump’s assessment. Millennials, more than GenXers, have seen that work loyalty does not exist or pay off, have seen things like education costs have skyrocketed while wages have not gone up accordingly.
I suspect it’s because many of the millennials saw their parents laid off in either the early 2000s recessions, or the 2008 recessions (or both), and have probably heard tales of their grandparents being laid off in the economic fluctuations of the 1970s and 1980s, and realize that the compact between workers and employers that purportedly existed until then is now gone, and has been replaced by something less.
They’ve basically seen what that old 1950s style of busting your ass for one company gets you when you’re too expensive to keep around when things get tight. So they don’t want to play ball.
Nor do they want to deal with the bullshit about “paying your dues”, which is another word (IMO) for institutionalized hazing in many cases. There’s nothing wrong with starting someone off with jobs and projects commensurate with their experience and education level, but it’s another thing entirely to saddle them with all the shit jobs because they’re the new person… until the next new person comes along.
That kind of mentality only works IF it’s in the context of a long-term position, where they’re “making their bones” so to speak, by doing the shit jobs early on and becoming part of the group. But if you feel like your employer will shit-can you in a couple of years in favor of some asshole in a third world country who literally works for beans, why would you even begin to pretend that it’s acceptable treatment?
It probably sounds whiny to people steeped in the old-timey mentality, and who have literally worked in the same job for 20 years. But to this Gen-Xer who hasn’t, it seems entirely reasonable, and probably much the same way I’d have felt had things been this way when I graduated from college.
I’m not convinced there ever was a “compact,” real or perceived. The employer-employee relationship has been an adversarial one since the employers were feudal lords stabbing the peasants.
I mean… “A Christmas Carol” was written in 1843. It seems modern because they adapt it every ten minutes but it’s one of the oldest universally-known stories in the English language that was published in the modern sense of publishing. People who fought in the Civil War were born after it was published. One of the central relationships in the story is between the protagonist, an asshole boss, and his employee; his realization that he is an asshole to his employee, and his fixing that, is presented as critical evidence of his redemption. That relationship was totally relatable to the people reading the story; many of Dickens’s fans had asshole bosses. It’s why Dickens was the most popular writer of his time. He knew his audience. (Surely I need not point out the zillions of other references to asshole bosses in the works of Dickens.) A contemporary of Dickens was Marx, who of course was of the opinion that all bosses are assholes and all workers exploited, and at the time he was mostly right.
Generations after that you had labor unions literally broken up with machine gun toting thugs. You had the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Mining strikes in Britain while Britain was in a state of war with the Nazis.
People have never gotten along much with the Man.
I resigned from my job today, ironically enough. 
I was talking mostly about post world war 2 America- even if there wasn’t really a compact, there was at least some notion that in exchange for loyalty, the companies would provide a great deal of job security. Whether or not that was due to economic boon times is sort of beside the point; it’s what a lot of older generations’ thinking is based on as the “ideal”, and a lot of notions of how workers should behave is predicated on that idea.
I mean, what benefit is there to company loyalty these days? You rarely get serious job security, you often get less in the way of pay raises than you’d get from a more mercenary approach to employment, and if you’re in a career that requires technical skill, you likely won’t get exposed to as many varieties of those technologies if you stay in one place.
But companies expect you to put their goals and the job first, even though in most cases there’s nothing in it for you, except the fear of being fired, and even there, if they’re likely to lay you off eventually, that blunts those fangs a lot.
Then you should have demonstrated why they were not needed rather than taking the lazy (and unsupportable) method of claiming they were not needed simply because they were not needed previously.
I started with the Bell System, and there was some degree of loyalty both ways - I knew plenty of people who had worked there 20, 30, 40 , in one case 55 years. If there were layoffs it was because of a seriously bad economy, not just to make the stock price go up a bit.
Today companies don’t even pretend that you should be loyal to them. And clearly in many employees are just cogs and salary policies encourage huge chunks to leave.
I think people have been saying “what’s the matter with kids today?” for a while now. I know they were saying it when I was younger.