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For every opinion piece written blaming the millennial generation for the decline of civilization (just this past year, Millennials have been blamed for ruining everything from the economy and home-financing to push-up bras and paper napkins), there exists an equal number of dissenting perspectives. Chief among the counter arguments is the suggestion that it seems a little premature to label an entire generation as irredeemably contemptible when the oldest among them are only in their early 30s.

Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day. Anyone blaming only Romans of a certain age when the city state was sacked – first by the Visigoths (410), then the Vandals (455), then the Ostrogoths (546), then the Normans (1084) and then finally the mutinous troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1527) – would be deemed utterly myopic.

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Nonetheless, millennials still get all the bad press. Just don’t equate their love of selfies and the eponymous shade of pink to catastrophic events like the mega asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. The title of worst scourge of all to plague the planet isn’t so easily won; it must be earned. To accomplish such a feat takes time. And so, while it may be too soon to point fingers of blame at a generation only now coming into its grown up years, perhaps we might look a little further back – oh, say, to the devil-spawning era between 1946 and 1964.