The Questioning Librarian

Increasingly, the economic news has been better and better. Unemployment continues to decline, to a current low of 5.6% , while the stock market has never been higher . Officially, the recession ended a few years ago . Yet the pain of the recession hasn't abated for the many millions who remain unemployed, including a large number of unemployed millennials, whose unemployment rate stood at 15% as of September 2014, especially those who have lost unemployment benefits. It does not lessen the pain of a family with two working parents, struggling to get by, who have had their SNAP benefits cut by Congress. The nearly one in four children in this country who live in poverty don't care a bit about how high the stock market has gone. The schools, universities and libraries across the country that have seen sharp cuts in funding can take little solace in decreasing unemployment, as they come up with increasingly creative ways to keep the lights on. The disconnect between politi...

In the last few years, there have been a slew of articles all managing, in one way or another, to disparage and malign millennials. From the NPR articles engaging in controlled hand-wringing about how the economy needs millenials to buy the cars and houses that they aren't buying, to articles about how millennials are having kids without marriage as a matter of course (gasp!), or worse,  don't want kids  at all (scandal!) and are leaving the church in droves, all the Very Serious People agree that millennials are all-around terrible human beings who would rather go back to living in their parents' basement after college instead of becoming Highly-Responsible Adults with grown-up jobs. Even other millennials have jumped on the millennial-hate bandwagon, feeling it their place to tell us all to just grow up already! Millennials are deeply entitled, and may not even be " cut out " for today's job market, the Very Serious People decree, after having been cod...