David Breland is the entertainment editor at The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected]. The iGeneration, those of us born between 1981 and 1999, is now officially the most narcissistic generation. Dan Zak, a staff writer for The Washington Post, tells in his article this past Sunday that narcissism and entitlement have been steadily on the rise since 1979, according to a study published this year in the Journal of Personality.
I think Zak is right, we are a bunch of self-absorbed brats. Just look at what we watch on TV: “The Hills,” “Laguna Beach” and the other lineup of B.S. reality shows on the air. What do these shows promote? Lavish lifestyles, erroneous entitlement and an “everyone else should be here for my needs” outlook on life are all pandered to us as the new American dream. This wonderful outlook has kids wanting everything and never giving up anything, much less one ounce of comfort.
Don’t believe this is true? Zak points to a crowded airport as a prime example of our ever-growing inner brat. Crowds of people with their own agenda on a tight schedule brings out the best in all of us. We scream at customer representatives, shove, cut in line and all other nastiness because our little schedules get messed up.
“You have people screaming at customer representatives at airports because it’s snowing out – as if people are entitled to have a sunny day,” said professor W. Keith Campbell, a specialist in the study of narcissism at the University of Georgia. “That’s where it gets out of hand, with entitlement, the issue is … there are certain times when we’re entitled and other times we’re not. The problem is when we have that meter wrong.”
Another prime example for our wonderful behavior is restaurants. You don’t have to be a professor of narcissism to be able to catch people showing their ass at an eatery. I have seen people be downright cruel to poor servers who are trying their best. God forbid in a crowded restaurant that we have to wait for our food a little longer. Clearly, it’s the restaurant’s fault and not us for perhaps pre-planning to maybe beat the lunchtime rush or just deal with the fact it’s busy in restaurants at certain times.
The Post article also happily coincided with another article. The other article, which perfectly backs up Zak’s claims, is by Max Blumenthal. The article, titled “Generation Chickenhawk,” documents a journey within last summer’s College Republican Convention in Washington, D.C. What Blumenthal found in his journey inside the College Republican collective was a bunch of able-bodied, smart college students. These students talked at length at how important the war in Iraq is, how we must stay the course, etc. All the answers by the students were perfectly hawkish.
These College Republicans must have all had rooms right by the Kool-Aid cooler because even a young Dick Cheney couldn’t rattle off the party line any quicker. Blumenthal recorded the students saying, “We need to fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.” He says many of the young GOP kids called the war on terror the “greatest cause of their time.”
Yet when asked by the interviewer why these young idealists in the prime of their life weren’t participating actively in the war on terror, (i.e., enlisting in the military), the first general response was “Uh …” What followed that was classic B.S. as the excuses ranged from “asthma, bad knees from playing baseball in high school, medical reasons and it [the military] is just not for me.”
Blumenthal managed to find only a couple of students that were even willing to enlist in the military.
Why am I discussing all of this? It’s simple. We’re a bunch of snot-nosed babies. Our generation is too good to get down and dirty. We want to be the big chief without ever being a little Indian. I’m not saying because these people don’t want to join the military that they’re bad. I’m saying that they’ll make a big speech about what should be done and then not act. In the video accompanying the story there is a wonderful elitist presence. As if to say, we’re too good to be in the military.
When our generation is dead and gone, our epitaphs should read “me first.” That’s why illegal immigrants are here. They’ll do jobs we are “too good” to do and be grateful for what pay they get.
Right now there are many experts trying to figure out a way to entice our generation to remain employed at companies because we’ve all become so jaded that we don’t care about jobs as much as one or two generations ago did.
This is not a wholesale accusation of all my peers, but you know who you are. The crux of the matter is that we don’t care. There is no sense of the greater good. Everything, everywhere is all about “me.” As long as we have our cable, gas and iPods, everything is cool, but let some little hiccup happen in our life and it’s the end of the world.
I learned a good lesson from my little stint overseas. If you die tomorrow, the world still turns. No matter how many Facebook friends you have, how many folks join your Facebook death group or how cool your friends think you are, the world keeps on going.
Maybe someone can find a little humility in that and will care a little more about the world outside their front door.