Generations

My Dad was a member of what we’ve come to call the “Greatest Generation:” the folks who struggled through the Great Depression and then fought and won World War II. He would certainly laugh at the sobriquet and tell you he was just doing what was expected, what everyone did.

I am firmly a part of the Baby Boomers, those millions of kids who were fathered by love-starved, sex-crazed soldiers, sailors and airmen coming home from the war.

Sociologists cast around for a name for the next generation and didn’t do so well, coming up with the lame Gen X – though Wikipedia credits Magnum photographer Robert Capa with the phrase in the early 1950s. It’s generally taken to mean people born after the boomers, from the early sixties to the early eighties.

Following the alphabet, someone decided that the next generation would be Gen Y, though I’ve also heard these people described as the Millennial Generation (Millennials for short), the Facebook Generation, Generation Next, Net Generation and my favorite, Echo Boomers.

My thoughts today though are on a generation whose time frame is a bit uncertain. Not Gen X or Gen Y, but Gen Whine. These are the Americans who complain about their lives, look for someone to blame for their troubles, sue at the drop of a hat and stumble through life taking little or no responsibility for their actions. They feel they are owed something and that everything bad that happens to them has to be someone else’s fault. And someone sure as hell better make it right for them.

I thought about these folks a lot last week. While the nation was focused on the Supreme Court and the oral arguments over the Affordable Care Act, I was more interested in another case. A New York judge (Melvin L. Schweitzer) threw out a lawsuit brought by a group of former students against New York Law School (not NYU). They claimed that they couldn’t find jobs and that that was the school’s fault. They did the work, they paid their tuition (or took out loans to do so) and now there was no call for their lawyerly skills.

So what should they do with those skills? Why, sue, of course. “It’s got to be someone’s fault that I can’t find a job so, I know, I’ll sue the school that trained me.”

Now, I’ll admit, the facts are more complicated – they always are – but come on people, get real! The economy tanked, business shrunk, everyone’s cutting back, even cities are going bankrupt – and lots of other people can’t find jobs either. It sucks, yes, but that’s life. GFOI!

As Judge Schweitzer said “Not every ailment afflicting society may be redressed by a lawsuit.”

Take that, you whiners. And stop looking for people to blame.