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The Moral Immaturity of the Millennial Generation
This morning in the PIT, I described my commute home last night from work. For those of you that haven’t heard, I recently moved to Portland, OR, where I work at one of the large hospitals downtown. Because of traffic and scarce parking, I take both the bus and the train into work. Last night, I left work about 15 minutes late. This may not seem significant, but when you’re beholden to a train schedule, leaving even 30 second late can put a major crimp in your commute. I was late leaving work because of the flurry of activity that happened with my patients at the end of my shift. One of my patients had come in with recent neurological changes, and after the work up had been done, at the end of my shift this patient was given a new diagnosis of cancer with a very poor prognosis. The family was sweet and understanding and appreciative; all of the things that make nurses remember why they became a nurse in the first place. I sat at the computer outside my patient’s room to chart, hearing the family cry together. I offered my presence and comfort, but it was clear that they wanted to be alone. At the nurses station, we all spoke in hushed tones about how sad it was, and how the worst diagnoses always seem to happen to the nicest people.
As you can imagine would be the case in Portland, my day had consisted of staff lamenting the election results. There was a litany of “I’m so depressed,” “I cried the whole time I was getting ready this morning,” and “I just can’t believe people would vote for him.” That morning, I over heard a woman tell her friend that Max (the light rail in Portland) had to close temporarily around one o’clock that morning because of protests; however, my commute to work was uneventful. I was anticipating an equally uneventful ride home, but that was not the case. When I got off the bus at Pioneer Square to catch Max, police were out securing crowd control barriers, and I could see an occasional “Trump is NOT my president” sign waving in the air. While running to catch the train that was pulling in, I saw a young hipster woman completely topless with anti-Trump sentiments written across her body. I reached the platform in time, but was informed by the police that the train would not be stopping at Pioneer Square because of the protests; I had to walk up five blocks to the next stop. Now, five blocks might not seem like much, but after a 13 hour day on your feet trying to slay the dragons of disease, it’s a lot. As I walked grumpily past all the 20-somthing homeless and protesters, I became increasingly incensed by the childishness of it all. I wanted to run back to find that young woman exposing herself and yell at her, “Showing everyone your tits won’t make a damn bit of difference or make anyone take you remotely seriously!! Put a damn shirt on and go get a job!” Meanwhile, my sweet patient was probably still crying in her hospital bed, coming to grips with her own impending death.
While I am technically a Millennial, I don’t feel like part of the group. The Millennial generation seems to be largely a generation of children who never got past elementary school in their moral development. In psychology we learned about Kohlberg’s stages of moral development: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. Historically, children make up those in the pre-conventional and conventional stages. Adults occupy the post-conventional stage, in which morality is driven by what is best for society or by a higher, empirical moral code. Children are concerned with being a “good boy” or “good girl.” Children see things as being black or white, an eye for an eye, fair is fair. As we mature, we are supposed to come to understand that things are not always fair, and tit for tat is not the best policy for society. Adults realize that our morals come from a higher source, and the rules must sometimes be broken in order to do what is right. The protesters in Portland and those spewing hate and hysterics on my Facebook feed have never grown up. For them, life must always be fair. If Sally gets a lollipop, then Kayla has to get one too. They don’t see inconsistency of their actions as relates to their stated beliefs of tolerance, acceptance, and diversity. They are children throwing a temper tantrum because they didn’t get a lollipop, but the conservatives did.
The contrast between the whininess taking place in Pioneer Square and the dignified sorrow of my patient and her family was shocking and infuriating. I wanted to drag that topless woman to the hospital and make her work with me for a week, to see the best and the worst of humanity. To see that life is not fair, and the nicest people you will meet are often the ones with the most devastating diseases. I’m not sure how to make the 20-somethings snap out of if. I can only hope that they eventually grow up.
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When one quotes an emoticon, it loses it’s CSS style for some reason. Max is aware of the issue.
@vicrylcontessa Thanks very much for a wonderful post.
Admiral!
More votes? Probably most of them originated in the inner cities via massive corruption. How about T. McCauliffe’s (sp?) enfranchisement of a huge contingent of felons? And, Philly is the home of vote stealing. Hillary did everything in her power to rig this election, but he power of Trump and the silent majority overcame her lawlessness.
This is not a winning argument or even a cogent observation by some standards. How does generational identification factor into this in any fashion? Anyway; electoral college; republic; Constitution; pure democracy is dangerous.
My wife also works in health care in the PDX community, and I’ve heard similar stories from her for years. We don’t understand how health care employees get behind socialism, Obamacare, etc.
Best wishes and thanks for your continued commitment to a prime helping profession, and thanks for sharing this story.
I thought that was something people did on purpose until it happened to me. Cute though.
Encephalitis
They make good cannon fodder.
In the spirit of good sportsmanship and class, you should of grabbed the cops taser and let her have it in the .. chest.
I’m so un-hip I had to google “kombucha,” and I still don’t really understand what it is.
I just assumed it was alcoholic and let it go.
Let’s just say, I’ll pass. With my weird system, all I need is a beverage that might kill a person.
Being cultured with a yeast (Saccharomyces,) Lactobacillus and at least some of the time mushroom culture, if not prepared properly has some hazard of unintended fungal or bacterial species appearing in it. Other than that, it’s very mildly alcoholic. It’s an acquired taste, but no particular reason it needs to be acquired. If you’re planning on consuming more fermented foods, there are lots of other great ways to go. If any of the above is questionably safe for you to consume, as you say, better not.
Probably not a great idea for those with histamine intolerance either what with the spent yeast sitting in the bottle.
I am not, nor fermented beverages, because they do zip, zero, nada for me. Caffeine does, though. I’ll just have my tea straight without ruining it with fermentation, though.
The ironic thing is that most of these protests are occurring within states that voted for Hillary. Why are they protesting against their own people, against a community of people who have similar values and vote like them? Nobody is going to hear them or care. You can’t always have your way in a body politic that holds elections and allocates a weighted number of electoral votes based on the outcome of a statewide election. They’re babies. They’re not even big babies. Stay focused on what’s important.
Sorry, Trin, I gotta give this one to @admiraljaneway. There’s no evidence, zip, nada, that there was massive inner city vote fraud this year, and not even the Trump campaign is claiming it. If the positions were reversed, we’d be griping about selected-not-elected Hillary; a discrepancy between the popular and electoral vote always looks dubious, but that’s the way it happens sometimes. Notice that unlike 2000, there’s no serious effort to contest the results by anyone in the Clinton campaign. So I think there are points to argue about, but the other side is making a cogent argument.
You could be right, but since the vote wasn’t close enough, the level of scrutiny is low. I think the Project Veritas videos are proof enough of at least some tampering, though. Once it’s harder to vote than it is to buy a six pack of beer, we’ll see…
Cheers!
This is an excellent post. Thank you, Vicryl Contessa.
Re: 106
A person who voted in New Haven, Connecticut has me convinced there was voter fraud there. And voter fraud could have been more subtle, of different types, and more widespread this time. The bad thing about the Trump win, and post election exhaustion, is that people want to blow off thinking about it. But no way in Hell do I believe that Hillary honestly won the popular vote.
As for the yahoos among the millennials, this is what you get when two generations of people act on the belief that they have more fulfilling and important things to do than to be, and to raise their kids to be, family and community focused adults. We neglect relationships and the long term best interests of our families, our churches (synagogues and mosques) and our towns. These kids at the chronological age of adults are what we get.
The immaturity you describe should shame the people that raised and educated them, I would think. The self esteem movement participation ribbons and no score sports, are cruel inventions that promote the idea that everybody is a winner, that nobody fails. They have produced a generation of inconsiderate poor sports. They are shocked that the result is not what they expected and felt they deserved. Instead of yelling, maybe have a little stash of participation ribbons to hand out, maybe that would shut them up. Evidently the little “I voted” sticker at the polling place wasn’t big enough.
So what? If the election were based on total votes, campaigns would have used different methods to get their message out. Plus the number of voters would have been different.
For example, assume you are a Republican in CA. On Tuesday, you knew you vote for President didn’t matter, and there were 2 Democrats running for the Senate seat. So why vote? On the other hand if the election were based on total votes, you would be highly motivated to vote, because now your vote matters. You would be more likely to take the time to vote.
The fact that HRC got more votes means nothing, because if the election was based on the number of votes, the vote totals would have been different and we have no way of knowing what the outcome would have been.
I take issue with Gary McVey’s assertion that ‘we’d’ be complaining if the results were reversed. Many of us understand the idea of the Electoral College. We understand federalism, Republics, and democracy. I wouldn’t care if the popular vote went overwhelmingly to an Electoral loser as long as there appeared to be no fraud When margins we see in total popular vote are so small, drawing any sort of conclusion from them is meaningless.
Having lived in Portland for four years in the mid nineties (Bill’s 1st term) I would say you are being a bit unfair by singling out the Millennials, I think it’s safe to say that Portland’s Lefties of any age never got past elementary school in their moral development.
Protesting is just as easily a display for those who might already be inclined to be sympathetic as it is anything else.
Not being sympathetic, we are the least likely to hear or care that they are protesting, except to the extent they create inconvenience and irritation. If we’re the audience least likely to be moved, then wouldn’t it stand to reason a more sympathetic audience is more likely to be moved?
Those who truly have no one sympathetic to them don’t so much protest as just “go postal” – if nobody in the audience sympathizes, you’re just crazy.
Being an old guy, I remember that one of the lessons I was expected to learn in sports and other competitive endeavors was how to accept defeat, and that learning such a lesson was one of the reasons I was supposed to participate.
I am of two minds about the protests. On one hand, there is certainly a lot of angst across the deep divide in the election. To the extent that the protests help people vent their emotions and calm down for more rational behavior later, the protests are understandable. Of course, I am not optimistic about more rational behavior later.
On the other hand, the protests seem to me to be an attempt to obtain a result through bullying and hate that they could not obtain through the rules of the election. The attempt to bully me angers me.
I too live in the Portland area, and share your sentiments. I also wondered how many of the protesters voted. Students blocked I-5 freeway for a bit, and I thought of scenarios: I thought of the single parents who might lose their baby sitter because they came home late. The adult child taking care of their aging parent who couldn’t get home to give them medicine. It is really heartbreaking to see our not so young people unable to process the complexity of the real world, to process viewpoints other than their own, to have empathy for those who may actually have places to be and schedules to stick to. I think of my grandfather fighting in ww2 in his early 20s, starting a family, embracing the beautiful and at times very difficult journey of adulthood. Today our youth seem to rather be lengthening adolescence another decade.
Readers who haven’t read Comment #7 should do so.
For #Ford Penney you apparently made a big positive contribution to that boy’s life, and you should be honored. Isn’t it interesting the ways in which various things we do can impact people in the most unexpected way.
The Popular vote to the Electoral College imbalance can be explained in one word: California.
If you were going to lose a deep blue state by nearly 2,570,000 votes how much time/money/effort would you apply to increase your popular vote total when doing so does nothing to help you win.
Toss in the same “why bother” in the states of New York(1,503,000) and Illinois(860,000) and in total you have three states worth 4,933,000 of margin of popular vote that goes essentially uncontested because it would be a waste of time and money under our Constitutional Electoral College system of electing a President.
Wasn’t it just a week ago that it was totally unacceptable that Trump even raised the possibility that he might have questions about the election results?
Welcome to what George H. W. Bush used to call “Little Beirut.”
Can you imagine if Trump supporters acted this way? The Liberals and the press would say it confirms that they’re fascists. I hear excuses for the protestors, i.e.: that most of them are peaceful and the destructive ones are professional protestors. No excuse would be made if they were Trump supporters. All would be tainted with the bad acts of a small minority. If its a rule applied to the Tea party and to the right, it applies to the democrats.
I didn’t vote for Trump and absolutely didn’t for Clinton, but these protestors make me glad that again that the likes of Clinton lost.
I live here too and my liberal friends are completely turned off by the protesters.
For ten years I worked in an ancillary department that was part of a bone marrow transplant program. We never left work without thinking, boy, this really puts your problems in perspective.