Ah, the joys of hype… I will point out that I’m not the first person that’s blogged about this, and I know I’m not going to be the last, but, well, who cares?

So, it all began with an article in the Christian Science Monitor titled, “Could this be the global-warming generation?“, with quotes like:

Their older brothers and sisters, however, think differently. “Generation Y is getting fired up about global warming,” says Jeff Angel, director of the Total Environment Centre, a green advocacy group in Sydney. “There’s a lot of evidence in Australia to show that young people look for employers with the right environmental credentials.”

In America, too, “there has been an absolute explosion among young people whose main concerns are related to the environment,” says James Pittman, who teaches Environmental Studies at Prescott College in Arizona. “They are concerned about their future and it is really starting to sink in.”

I know the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, and I know I don’t exactly live with or work with a representative sample here, but, considering how the people indicating that “Generation Y: Seeks green employer” are the director of the Total Environment Centre and an Environmental Studies professor, I’m wondering if their dataset is as broad as they think it is, especially when you considering the following:

During the concert…

“There are people at this event who are not picking up their trash,” said Clive Hall, a bartender and deejay from Brooklyn, N.Y.

Cassie Toner, another attendee, was disappointed that there weren’t more efforts to inform concertgoers. “I thought that there were going to be more educational and NGO booths set up outside,” but instead, she said, companies gave away useless materials, which were strewn around the grounds.

Some of the singers also openly admitted to being relatively uninformed. Akon, a singer who has spent much of the year at the top of the charts, admitted to not knowing what “green” meant until the day of the show, but said that he had decided to perform because he “wanted to be more educated about it.”

Meanwhile, ratings weren’t what they could be, failing to even outdraw the NHL.

So, long story short, there was a concert based around environmentalism that was supposed to be generation defining that failed to be environmentally friendly and failed to draw any ratings on TV. In other words, it failed. It’s at this point that I’d like to mention the following:

This is not the 1960s. We are not our parents. People of my generation are more than cynical enough to know that, when a bunch of rich rockers and an opportunistic politician get together, the result is going to be a decent concert with some preaching to justify all the bands coming together. It’s not going to be generation defining, it’s not going to really advance any cause, and it’s certainly not going to live up to its own principles. Put another way, Woodstock isn’t happening again because large Woodstock-sized concerts happen often enough now where they’re not groundbreaking. In fact, to be brutally honest, many of us are kind of ticked that we’re “Generation Y” in the first place - just because we happen to be born between 1980 and 1989, does that really mean that we have enough in common to be a labeled generation, with shared experiences that define us? Do we have to be “Generation X+1″ because nobody could come up with anything better to name us? Did anyone ask those of us born in 1980 that are actually old enough to remember the Cold War, Operation Desert Storm, and the Rodney King riots if we thought we have all that much in common with those born after 1985 that, honestly, remember none of this? Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, we periodically have people from our parents’ generation that remember things like Woodstock and Summer of Love and say, “Hey, why can’t our kids do that?” This, of course, leads to someone from that generation trying to make those “generation-defining events” happen for us by throwing rock concerts like Live Earth, which misses the point:

The reason Woodstock and Summer of Love were “generation defining” for you in the first place is because two things were true:

1. Nothing like them had ever been done before.
2. YOU were the ones throwing the party, not your parents.

You want to know what would be a form of rebellion for us? Well, so do we, to be honest - you guys did enough drugs, sex, and who knows what else to raise the bar high enough (pardon the expression) that we’d end up killing ourselves trying to exceed it. So, it’s a little easier these days to go the other way, to go conservative, to vote Republican or join a church or something.

For what it’s worth, I’ve tried both - it’s not that interesting. *grin*

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