Enjoy your life…dummy

Last week in class (Culture of the 1950’s) we watched a documentary on the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. As one of the documentary participants was describing the deaths of the Rosenbergs in graphic detail, my classmate, Giselle, took out her iBook, opened Safari and went directly to perezhilton.com

Let that sink in.

Yeah.

The thing I hate about the kids I got to school with is their detachment and apathy. It’s not just this class. It’s the majority of the kids that sit alongside me. I know. I get it. I sound like an old curmudgeon who’s about to start waxing about how I had to walk to a one room schoolhouse in the snow…8 miles away…..with bare feet.

At their age I was also an asshole. I’m positive of it. But this new breed of asshole, romantically named “the millenials” are particularly offensive. There’s a new niche market of business consultants getting paid to inform companies how to deal with these little snotfaces. One particularly astute assessment has been made by Richard Laermer.

To really hammer the point home…a few kids were talkingto a visiting Accounting major from TCNJ and she asked them what they planned to do with a History degree. One girl answered, “whatever they pay me to”. Nice. I guess I just don’t understand what happened and it’s not just kids I go to class with at Rutgers, it’s people I work with, people in my family, people I know. Doesn’t anyone care about anything that matters? Doesn’t anyone give a shit about being a little informed? Why are bullshit distractions like myspace and perezhilton completely consuming the collective conscience of this country? Sincerity has been replaced by snarkiness and caring about issues is now fodder for ironic parody.