Ah yes, the degenerate youth of today. I'm either Gen X or Gen Y (depending on how you define these labels), been part of the work force since I was 15 and paid my way through college with scholarships and loans. It's interesting to me to hear older generations accuse us of "having everything handed to us" and "feeling entitled." What about the segment of the boomer population who feel entitled to drive everywhere in huge gas-guzzling cars, or generate enormous amounts of landfill waste - they're "handing" us pollution and climate change problems. And retirees who "feel entitled" to Social Security and Medicare benefits disproportionate to what was contributed? The SS worker-to-beneficiary ratio has fallen from 16.5-to-1 in 1950 to 3.3-to-1 today. So my generation has to support ourselves, our children, and our parents all at once and at a much higher rate. I've worked at a retirement/nursing home and seen the abuses of Medicare supported by our generation's tax dollars. If I am "sensitive to anything that may be construed as criticism," it may be because we ARE constantly being criticized, subjected to sweeping generalizations, and yet are being handed a set of incredible expectations, set up by the people who are so quick to criticize. I'm constantly seeing articles about how awful my generation is, but I have yet to see an article about how some boomer expectations of a thirty-year government-funded retirement might be a little out of line with the original intent of SS/Medicare/Medicaid. (Don't get me wrong, I'm so grateful we have social programs to keep our elders out of poverty and misery, but nobody can deny we have a basic supply & demand problem.)

Greylodge writes, "To be sure, part of that is simply youth - every damn generation seems to think it is getting a raw deal compared to previous generations and the young have always been hypersensitive to criticism." Maybe so, but there're plenty of findings from people studying quality of life issues to support that our generation probably won't have the quality of life that the boomers did. At risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I'd propose a deal - if we could all stop calling each other names and instead take responsibility for how our actions impact other generations, we might all be better off in the long run.