Christian Life 25 - My Rabbit Hole: Stereotypes

     I've been going down a rabbit hole over the last 24 hours.  A Facebook friend shared a post by someone using the pseudonym "Millennials [redacted]" that read "Apparently the boomers are mad big time we're not having enough grandkids and like lmao look around at the world you built."  That statement has a lot to unpack, but I want to start with my own immediate response.

    I didn't reply to the original post, but did respond to my friend with "Out of curiosity, do Millennials think Boomers messed up the planet, or is that just a frequently told joke?  I've always wondered, but haven't had the guts to ask."  I've gotten a couple of replies, both of which have been surprisingly civil.  One pointed out, correctly, that the government had certain economic and environmental safeguards in place from the 30's through the 80's, but those have been getting persistently eroded by elected officials in the intervening years, making it much harder for Millennials to cope.  My response to that one was that, while I agree that this is truly happening, my question really had to do with the virtue of blaming 76 million people for the actions of a few thousand.  I didn't include this, but I thought about the fact that, yes, a group of politicians, pundits and civilians did manage to seize control of the government in the 80's and have held it since, and yes, they've done a lot to harm anyone not a member of their own group.  However, I'm not certain you can blame that on everyone born between 1946 and 1964.  Most of us had nothing to do with it and, in fact, disagreed with almost all of it (as we still do).  As for why we let it happen, quite frankly, we were, at the time, too busy raising you to have had time to pay much attention.

    That got me thinking about stereotypes in a broader sense.  We all know about stereotypes.  We all employ them every day.  The human brain is hard-wired to catalog things into broad groups.  As decades of research has shown, the concept of multi-tasking is a myth.  The brain can only concentrate on one thing at a time.  Therefore, the brain is constantly attempting to limit the number of things it must think about, and creating stereotypes is one of a number of shortcuts the brain takes to facilitate this limiting effort.

    The problem, of course, is that people refuse to be pigeonholed.  Let us take for example one of the politicians' and pundits' favorite stereotypes - the unemployed.  These folk want to believe that all unemployed are so by choice, that they are inherently lazy and are simply a drain on our tax dollars, the dollars that the rest of us - the employed - are forced to pay into the system against our will, and we therefore resent having to work twice as hard to support not only ourselves and our families, but support the willfully idle as well.

    Here's my observation on the matter: when I find myself engaged in conversation with someone espousing this view, I can easily think of several mutual acquaintances who may be currently jobless, and I will usually mention their names.  My interlocutor  will inevitably respond with something to the effect of, "well, that person is an exception to the rule."  We can then think of others who, while not necessarily mutual acquaintances of the two of us, are nonetheless friends of other mutual friends.  They, too, are exceptions to the rule. Then we have friends of friends of friends who also don't fit the stereotype.  In fact, as we discuss more and more actual individuals rather than a vague "majority," we can think of almost no one who does fit the rule.  By this point, I'm thinking that, with so many exceptions, it's not a very good rule.

    The exact same principle can be applied if we're talking about immigrants, African-Americans, women, LGBTQ, the poor, or any other group of "Them," including Boomers (who aren't all self-righteous), Millennials (who aren't all lazy bums), Liberals (who aren't all bleeding hearts) and Conservatives (who aren't all misers).  Yes, there is one bad apple in any barrel (sometimes two), but that's hardly a reason to condemn the entire barrel as bad.  And since "bad" often means "rotten," even the bad apple - while unfit for eating - is perfectly fit for planting and may someday become a tree that produces hundreds and thousands of good apples in the future.

    Finally, as for how Baby Boomers built a messed up planet, the truth is that every generation inherits issues from their predecessors (and, for what it's worth, the planet was plenty messed up before Boomers came along).  Some we try to fix, and in our incompetent efforts to fix them often create more.  For most, though, we simply do the best we can trying to raise the next generation to be more competent than we are and hope that some among them will succeed where we failed.  That's not something between Boomers and Millennials; that's something between every generation and their parents since we climbed down out of the trees.  Of course, the point of that particular Millennial's post was that they don't intend to have children, so I suppose they'll never understand this.

Pax