their short attention spans, their infatuation with technology, their bizarre sexual habits, cultural preferences, political behavior and their peculiar and distributed sense of online community

Funny, those are the things that I find rather adorable about the young'uns. It seems I'm not alone--a minor chord in the Kids These Days Chorus is the odd yet unmistakable affinity between Boomers and Millenials. Not everybody criticizes them.

Opinion surveys consistently paint this cohort as what we would label "liberal", with their own distinctive twist on it. It's not just that they're compatible with me philosophically, but I think they give us hippies some credit for taking the first run at revolution--at major social reform, in more polite terms. They know we mostly failed, but we get a few points for trying. They look at their own futures and they know that things have to change, and change radically. They'll take it from here, but I'll be cheering from the sidelines.

You wouldn't expect me to be bothered by "their infatuation with technology", of course; but you should expect I'll connect it to "their peculiar and distributed sense of online community".

"Well yeah", he wrote on a "BBS". On the Internet. In a virtual nursing home, thank you not much, the remnant of a distributed online community. Which part of this do I have to explain to you, of all people?

But I'll add this: I've seen this dichotomy coming, as these Millenials have been building their own parallel culture in cyberspace. I remember a conversation with my brother, a middle school counselor, around the turn of the century. He was concerned, his profession was concerned, about the kids clumped silently at recess, thumbs flying on their primitive texting cellphones. He saw alienation and separation, a social desert; but I saw a cloud of packets swarming around the kids, knitting them closely together in a realtime shared community (didn't he wonder who was on the other end of each texted conversation?). A place that, for the first time in human history, the kids could be sure of having all to themselves, away from the grownups.

That was fifteen years ago. They have a rich culture now, built in cyberspace, and much of it is invisible to us.

I can only claim the ability to see it because I'm one of the plumbers who keeps their pipes flowing. But flow they do.

ER, dude, I think you're getting old if you can criticize the kids for "their bizarre sexual habits". Oh lordy lordy, have you forgotten the Free Love, and the Summers of Love, one after another?

Now, you may be referring to that "gender fluidity" thing. There, especially, we old farts should keep quiet. But I have to admit one thing: Miley Cyrus, their fluidity icon, has managed to achieve something extraordinary: I don't want to see her breasts any more. I've seen them enough. For a while there, every other clickbait headline had the phrase "Miley Cyrus's breasts!" in it. Stop, Miley, just stop!

Did I mention I'm an uncle of Millenials? It's true, so maybe I'm prejudiced. One niece has a degree in anthropology, and is planning to go all the way to her doctorate. The other is a recent mechanical engineering graduate, and just went to work for the Pentagon. One nephew is working more than full time as a skilled welder. The other nephew is still trying to figure out, but I have hope for him--he's sincerely seeking. The point is, the Millenials I know are pretty impressive individuals. They're creatures of their times, trying to navigate an economy and a world very different from the one you and I grew up in, ER.

Their world is harder. I feel for them.