20 reasons baby boomers should shut the hell up about millennials

When baby boomers talk trash about millennials, calling them entitled or self-obsessed, they are blithely ignoring the tremendous failings of the boomer generation and the hypocrisy the kids can see right through. So, we’re holding up the mirror to the generation that has been in charge of the world for decades. What have they wrought? (Getty Images) less When baby boomers talk trash about millennials, calling them entitled or self-obsessed, they are blithely ignoring the tremendous failings of the boomer generation and the hypocrisy the kids can see right ... more Image 1 of / 32 Caption Close 20 reasons baby boomers should shut the hell up about millennials 1 / 32 Back to Gallery

By god, if I hear one more of my baby boomer peers call millennials — the humans who were born between 1981 and 1997 — "entitled," I'm going to withdraw my CDs, cash in all my stocks, sell my house and new cars, cancel my robust company-sponsored health insurance, take out a loan against my company-backed life insurance, shuffle around my 30-year-company-matched 401(k), grab up all my college diplomas, contact my representatives and lawyer friends to create an off-shore banking account ... and ... and ... buy a ticket to Elon Musk's Mars.

OK, I don't have all those things. And, born in the mid-'60s, I'm as much Gen-X'er like Mr. Musk as baby boomer, but you get the point:

The baby boomers have lapped the cream right off the top of the milk and then turned over the bucket.

We're talking generally here, as in very broadly, but the American boomer is one of the most pampered, self-obsessed creatures on the planet. It's true they had their mild economic troubles and were maimed by their parents over Vietnam, but even so, no generation has ever had it so good.

And, yet, the kids are "entitled" and "don't know how to work" and so on ...

By and large, this is the world we made — we're a giant generation that has ruled the roost for at least 30 years since our venerable War Generation parents started slipping out of control, health and mind.

Now, here come the millennials. The Pew Research Center reported Monday that the m's have overtaken the boomers as America's largest generation. Those pesky kids between 19 and 35 now number 75.4 million, and young immigrants will continue to grow that number in the U.S. for years.

That's currently a million more than the retiring-at-the-rate-of-10,000-a-day booms.

Something wrong with the kids?

We gave them awards for just showing up and guided them from here to there by hand. We also filled their lives with stories of impending doom, from guns and toxins to climate death. And now we are, in fact, in the process, the very cold-hearted process, of abandoning them on a planet increasingly likely to kill them and their kids in large numbers.

Not to mention the trillion bucks in education debt. It's their fault! They didn't have to take out those loans!

Yeah, but there used to be a path to the middle class as wide as the Mississippi. Never mind that we TOLD them to do it and created a world around them that requires some form of post-high school education for a stable economic life ... and then crashed the economy just when they need us the most.

Fear them!

Don't get me wrong, they generally annoy the shit out of me, too, with their group-positive spirit, running around in herds everywhere, acres of elaborate tattoos, EDM and Beyoncé ... the whole top-knot thing is especially baffling to me.

And, screw it, maybe they do have an entitled attitude. But it's not like we didn't teach them to have it.

In the end, no matter how we feel about them, there's a bunch of 'em and they are going to be running far more things far sooner than the gripe-y Gen-X'ers. In fact, they were the key in our northern neighbors' most recent election -- the one that brought on the diversity-happy, pot-friendly, feminist and quantum-computing-slick Justin Trudeau into office and made him a rock star across the globe.

And, we'd better watch it too! They might just decide to kick us to the curb and spend our retirement on fixing the planet. After all, it was we who taught them through our actions that it's OK to warehouse your parents, instead of taking them in and spending time with them.

Or, as a writer at Reason.com put it to his fellow m's:

You're not getting screwed by billionaires and plutocrats. You're getting screwed by Mom and Dad. Systematically and in all sorts of ways. Old people are doing everything possible to rob you of your money, your future, your dignity, and your freedom.

Basically, we boomers need to shut the hell up and do something decent for once. And while we contemplate what Denethor said in "Lord of the Rings" — "A chance for Faramir, captain of Gondor, to show his quality" — let's take a good, hard, nasty look at what the boomers have wrought. See gallery above.

Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook. If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.