I
n some ways, I don't necessarily despair of my generation. I mean, obviously in many ways it's terrible, and occupies a particularly shallow and imaginatively impoverished (if not materially impoverished) period of history. I'm sure that most millennials wouldn't rub me in the right way on meeting them, but the same can be said of any group of people, really.
No, what's interesting is that there is a certain kind of person that does rub me the right way, and they're all millennials. Somehow, amongst my friends and family, there's a distinctive breaking with the overall societal tides that swell against us. Where modern Americans are cast to all corners of the earth, losing touch with kith and kin alike, we have all stayed put, or returned. Where many millennials struggle to find friends, we've maintained a tight knit group over more than decade. Where young people are increasingly single and childless, my friends and I have nearly all gotten married and started having children, in our mid-twenties to early-thirties. Where most congregate in cities, we've gone to the countryside, and most have managed to get mortgages on houses one way or another. And while so many young people these days are Extremely Online, and filled with vapid political fervor, most of my circle is level-headed and focused on doing good for that which is closest. We work working-class to middle-class jobs. We still say "gay" and "retarded" sometimes.
This is who I get along with. I have no idea how I found so many people like this. I should note that the good folk I'm referring to above aren't even from my Church -- these are my secular friends that I've had since long before my conversion. I don't know what was in the water in Vermont and upstate New York thirty-ish years ago, but I somehow stumbled across a bunch of intelligent, fun-loving, open-minded rascals who also are doing the hard, banal, glorious work of carrying on the human species, in spite of it not being the popular move anymore. You can call it selection bias, but people wish they could bias their selections this good! This has been only a sort of sociological overview of those I find myself close to -- they shine even more brightly when looked at in their individuality. I'm extraordinarily blessed to know every one of them, and they give me some hope for the future. A rare currency.