The Thing About My Generation

Story Time!

One day some girls and I were just outside of one of the dorm halls at university waiting to get picked up by a shuttle, nothing fancy, just a normal rainy day.

The door to the building opened and another girl stepped out and proceeded to open her umbrella up, except that it wouldn't budge. She kept going at it though, and with a little help from the wind it had opened all the way-in that way that wind likes to do with umbrellas. But she didn't let that phase her, she popped it back down to normal and stepped off the curb in her ballerina flat shoe-right into a decent sized puddle. Letting out a sigh, she just kept going right on across the street, never looking back, maybe mortified, maybe just annoyed.

Perhaps we could have done something for that girl, but the incident went by quickly and the time to step in never came. Us shuttle girls just looked on silently, hoping to be of assistance if needed. As soon as the umbrella girl was out of earshot though, one of the shuttle girls vocalized the thought I was carrying in my own head. You know what that one word was?

"Same."

No laughter, no judgement, just a deep down understanding what that episode must have felt like.

This is one of the things I love most about my generation; this odd sense of nonjudgmental connection based on even the smallest of human experiences. Internet memes bring us together. We understand and speak a bizarre digital language. It's amazing and hilarious. Every orchard has bad apples, sure, but I'm already starting to see signs of an empathetic, innovative army of young people forming. We will change the world, I'm positive of it.