In the middle of an
already fantastic article, Adam Weinstein pens one of the most phenomenal paragraphs I've read recently:
But there's nothing for us to suck up, really. As a rule, our parents did
end up much more dedicated to their careers than we have. But as a
rule, they were laid off less. They didn't intern or work as independent
contractors. They got full medical. They were occasionally permitted to
adopt magical unicorn-like money-granting creatures called "pensions."
Or, barring that, they accumulated a huger 401K to cash out before the
Great Recession, because they saved more. And they saved more because
the costs of college, of kid care, of health care, of doing business and
staying alive and buying groceries and staying connected, were far less
than they are today. They could raise a family on one salary if
necessary.
Go ahead and read the rest. I'll wait.
Good, right? There's a lot to say here (and I've already said
some of it) but Weinstein does it well enough and there's something else I want to focus on.
Now, if you're like me, you're stupid and therefore scrolled down to the comments section after reading the article. There, you found that the first comment was a real piece of work, painfully oblivious to
everything Weinstein had just said and writes him off as a coddled, entitled Gen Y-whiner (I refuse to turn that into an easy portmanteau). Weinstein rebuts him beautifully, and it's cathartic, but something sticks out in "shootingfan's" tone deaf, self-serving reply. He leads off--
leads off, mind you--with this:
A generation that grew up with soccer games that weren't scored because we wanted everyone to feel like a winner.
Okay, stop. I've heard this canard before. You probably have, too: youth sports leagues eliminating competition, thereby turning kids soft, thereby leaving them unprepared for the real world, thereby something-something off-my-lawn. You're probably even aware of the
recent satire of this phenomenon that too many people
assumed to be legitimate because confirmation bias is a bastard. Problem is, I'm not aware of any specific examples of this kind of thing. I'm not saying they don't exist--though I seriously wonder--but in casual polling of friends and acquaintances my age, I've not heard of them experiencing such things.
The closest I've come to this is my own experience. My youth baseball league instituted a slaughter rule: if one team scored five runs in an inning, the inning ended and the game moved on. This seems to me (looking back) to be more about practical matters regarding baseball. No clock means a game could go on forever and if one team tacks on five runs in one inning in youth baseball, we may be dealing with a skill imbalance or a perpetual momentum situation and a game could go on for hours. Understand: the
game didn't end when a team scored five runs, we just moved on (and I definitely remember playing on at least one team that saw the merciful side of the slaughter rule). Because our games went six innings, a game could still end 30-0 and a tally-mark would still be added to the loss column: not exactly a coddling of the young if things got that far.
For now, I'll ignore the question of
who is responsible for such rules (a point I've
touched on before), until we can establish whether they exist and how pervasive they are and what impact they've had on us. What I'm looking for is evidence, anecdotal though it may be, of people of my generation who remember these rules. If you were born in the roughly 1980-1995 window--kids for whom the coddling is assumed to have been in the ascendant and who are now aging into college, the workforce, etc--do you have memories of scoreless games? Of activities that were more feel-good-oriented than learning-oriented or even
fun-oriented (subject for another time: kids mostly don't give a shit about scores, they're just fine having fun until another kid or some sad, lonely adult insists on inserting hyper-competitiveness)?
Or is it all bitter horseshit, spewed by people too alienated and desperate for self-affirmation to admit that some gripes--like Weinstein's--are legitimate?
