Beside the G.O.P. suicidal rout (The Donald), the whole nation and perhaps the world, have arrived at a point where must face its main demographic challenge: age.
Here in the U.S.A. the big true is that Baby Boomers and Generation X, are no longer the driving force in the labor market, neither, of course, in the consumer market or educational market. Millennials, those born between 1980 and 2000 represent the future, and the present as well.
And let’s be clear: in this country, when you say Latino, you are, pretty much, saying Millennial. A huge segment of these groups are very young men and women that were born in the U.S. but were raised in a Mexican, Dominican, or Central American family. They are American born immigrants. They will be, in a few decades, the parents of one third of the population in this country.
The Pew Research Centers says that 44.6 million Baby Boomers (those born between 1945 and 1963) were working in 2015. Also in 2015, Millennials (53.5 millions), surpassed Generation X (52.7 millions) to become the largest share of the American workforce. Although the clue here is not with the numbers, but with the tendencies: Baby boomers are retiring, the Xers, looking for a comfy exit door, meanwhile Millennials looking forward to take over.
They are young; they surf on top of the Telecom revolution of the last decades. Therefore, they are global. They are hungry. And that is it.
By definition, Millennials must be better than previous generations. But they are confused. On a worldwide scale, one in six young people do not have access to a real job or education. In Spanish they are the “Ninis” (ni estudian ni trabajan). No surprise, they feel defeated, frustrated and angry. Very angry. Here in the north, they want either Sanders or Trump. In the Middle East, they may sympathize with ISIS. In the south, they may like El Chapo Guzmán or, even worse, his Queen, Kate the Producer.
In a natural consequence of the huge parenting mistakes of Xers and Boomers and some others that come with the Millennials own problems, in a world where the old role models are broken, the economic expectations are crazy and the revolution (not political but real) is happening, too many Millennials are lost.
In this context, you can also blame the Media. According to some news reports, trust in the mass media is at an all-time low in America. A Gallup poll (September 2015) found that only four in ten people trust the media: “Trust in the media continues to be significantly lower among Americans aged 18 to 49 than among those 50 and older, continuing a pattern evident since 2012”.
The clash of generations is crystal clear among Latinos (beside the still powerful cultural bonds that unite their families), in their daily life there is not easy to mix the world of Telenovelas of their grandmothers, the night news shows of their parents and the small screen hip-hop videos of their own.
To end with an overused metaphor, with t his many barriers that separate us, what is needed more nowadays is the construction of bridges among our generations and not more walls.
