W e are the millennial generation, and we live in a time confronting great crisis and awaiting great change. We are idealists with high hopes for the world and for ourselves. We are digital natives living part time at the center of our personalized social networks . We are equal-rights supporters embracing inclusion along lines of sexual orientation, gender and immigration status.
We are also doubters of our institutions. Less inclined than those before us to identify as either religious or patriotic, we limit our trust in society. We see government as distant and dysfunctional, we see religion as a force of ethics yet tradition, and we see leaders protecting their own interests at the price of those they serve .
We place our trust into the only place we have left: ourselves. While the American dream still remains only a dream for no fewer of us, its appeal runs deep. It’s a human need to have a sense of agency — the sense that my future will be bright if I make it so . We gaze up at the good life, tuck down our chins and push forward against the headwinds left from the Great Recession.
But our doubts are telling us something. We’re reminded of it when our college tuition and cost of living grow slowly higher above our ability to pay year after year, when we enter an economy more educated but less employed and less paid than our parents or grandparents were at our age and when we realize that the government that represents us and the businesses that pay us are unable to respond .
The economy has continued growing, but the middle class has long stopped growing with it. The share of national income earned by the middle 60 percent has continually declined since 1968. Median household income has fallen by about 10 percent since its peak in 1999, and since the Great Recession , 95 percent of income gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent .
So long as our economic and political leaders continue business as usual, inequality will grow. So long as we only ask “How much?” and not “How?” of economic growth, environmental devastation will continue. The course we have set is not a sustainable one for our society or our planet, and the rate of our unsustainability should leave no doubt: These crises will take center stage in our lifetime.
But with great crises come great resolve. Our institutions of business and government will bend again toward justice. Only for so long can more of our society and our planet lose the basic ability to thrive until we remember our voice.
We never lose our most powerful tool: our shared democratic spirit — the desire to have a say in the institutions that govern our lives. When united, it can move history, and one day, we will move both government and business step by step closer to the democratic ideal in which the voices of many, but the humanity and future of us all guide our society.
We are the millennial generation, and we live in a time confronting great crisis and awaiting great change. Will we be history’s observers or writers when it next bends toward justice?
