I saw a video on Facebook labeled: “Our youth…this video is truly terrifying.” After watching it, I deemed it worthy of a share. My re-post said, “yes…truly terrifying.” The video was a person-on-the-street type post with a young woman on the campus of a major university asking students seemingly obvious questions about American history: “Who won the civil war?”, “Who were the participants in the Civil War?”, “Who is the Vice President?”, Etc. The answers given were funny and utterly wrong.

Then the same students were asked about Jersey Shore; about who was currently married to Brad Pitt; about who Brad Pitt was married to before Angelina Jolie. Correct answers came immediately. Of course, the point of the whole bit was “these students are ignorant about important things like our history, but they know pop culture.” The editing of the video was such to accentuate their ignorance in important things and their obsessions with the inane.

As I read through the accumulating responses to my Facebook post it began to dawn on me that, much like the students in the video, I too had been manipulated. It happens all the time. It’s a simple hook, easy to set. This highly edited video was designed to evoke a response. The response desired was a “click.” The more clicks, the more traffic, the more advertising revenue. The video was easy comedy bait and for the most part harmless. It wasn’t terrifying at all.

So why had I labeled it as such? Well, I wanted some clicks on my Facebook post. It would allow me to jump on that bandwagon and ride. But there was something else going on here. I began to recognize the cynicism the post was dredging up. We were coloring a whole generation of people with a very broad brush. Quite frankly, I was posting fake news and benefitting from it.

I sat in on a lecture this week about “Millennials” and “Generation Z.” The “Boomer” presenters cited all the cliche’ traits that have made Millennials the brunt of so many late-night TV monologues and internet memes (just like the one I posted). But we, the boomers sitting in this class, were fortunate enough also to have a very accomplished millennial sitting in with us. And when he finally had heard enough, he spoke up, eloquently and truthfully, pointing out the inaccuracy of our generalizations.

This “kid” was not an outlier. In fact, we were sitting in a classroom on a university campus utterly filled with more millennials just like him. And there were a couple of universities just down the street also filled to the brim with more creativity and energy and productive naiveté ready to take on the new but very familiar old problems our world continually reframes and asks us to solve.

So, I guess the point of this observation is two-fold:

• The video bit was funny but probably not terrifying.
• The cynicism I was feeding is perhaps closer to being terrifying but usually not funny.

I’ll try to remember this before I post next time.