Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
Mocking millennials has become a sport and a pastime. You’ve heard most of the complaints: about the trophies for showing up, the Instagramming of tedium, the use of Venmo to buy street drugs.
They ruined lunch, motorcycles and marriage. They gave us selfies at funerals and placenta pix from the delivery room. As they move into the dominant demographic position in American life, they’ve made doorbells obsolete (better to text), vacations passé (too busy) and face-to-face conversations a lost art (see doorbells).
They prefer liquid soap to a simple bar. They’re killing the Post Office, phasing out breakfast cereal, dashing dinner dates. Ditto mayonnaise; in the era of identity condiments, it’s too bland. They’re the Lamest Generation.
And worst of all, they don’t vote.
The Washington Post blamed millennials for the 2016 election result, even though they made up just 25 percent of the electorate. Yes, Donald Trump — the most self-absorbed, television-fixated, crybaby boomer of them all — is the fault of young people because not enough of them got off their phones and cast a ballot for someone else.
That is bogus. Baby Boomers gave us Donald Trump, the draft-dodging, tax-evading, wife-cheating poster child for ’60s-bred self-indulgence. It’s boomers who are bankrupting the nation with a trillion-dollar deficit from a selfish tax cut. And it’s boomers who are ignoring climate change while Earth convulses and heads toward an early end.
I’ve given up hope that boomers can rescue us from the tyranny of the Trump age. Boomers were supposed to fix things, build things, save things for future generations. They would see things as they are, and instead of asking why, dream of things that never were and ask why not — as Robert Kennedy promised. Allow me to burn my generational card.
But the moment of greatness will soon arrive for millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996. Within a year or so, there are projected to be more of them among eligible voters than us. This is good. Millennials are more progressive and unafraid of change. They are forward-looking. They are more appalled by Trump and his party than any other generation. Their lie detectors are first-rate.
But millennials have one glaring, society-crushing character problem, and it has nothing to do with sandwich preference: They truly don’t vote. Too many have checked out of the whole citizen-power thing. You can blame the lack of civics education during their formative years, when not enough of them studied the owner’s manual of democracy. Now it’s a pain in the butt, an afterthought, or OMG, is there an election? Or you can blame a dozen other reasons.
The numbers tell a shameful story. Barely half of all eligible millennial voters cast a ballot in the last presidential election, compared with nearly 70 percent of baby boomers and the two generations older than them.
The midterms are far worse. In 2014, just 16 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 voted. So, while I love the placard that a kid held up during one of the March for Life anti-gun protests this year — “You can’t fix stupid but you can vote it out” — midterms are largely ignored by the young.
And this November, with a president and a party in power determined to turn back time, only 28 percent of young adults say they are “absolutely certain” they will vote in midterms, according to one poll. By comparison, 74 percent of seniors say they will show up on Election Day. Other polls show a higher turnout among those at the front end of adult life, but it still lags behind those at the opposite end.
Old folks are counting on the young to be clueless, to stay in a social media stupor while the rest of the country designs the future. A terrific online ad by Knock the Vote shows a series of senior citizens mocking millennials. “Climate change — that’s a you problem. I’ll be dead soon,” a retiree says. “I can’t keep track of which lives matter,” another says. And my favorite: “You might even share this video on Facebook, but you won’t vote. You never do.”
Are millennials just going to take that kind of abuse? Are they no better than that empty husk of a man, Sen. Ted Cruz, who let Donald Trump insult his wife and accuse his father of involvement in the Kennedy assassination? Have they no pride?
Right now, we have government by an entitled, pampered and aging minority. Barely 46 percent of the popular vote put Trump in office. And senators representing 44 percent of the population just gave a man whose views are not shared by a majority a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court.
Government by the few and the well connected will continue so long as the emerging majority does not exercise the most powerful option for a citizen. The good news is that turnout increases by about 1 percent each year. But we can’t afford to wait. Millennials, this one’s on you.
Timothy Egan is a columnist for The New York Times.
