The Newest Storytellers

Earlier this week, I read Joel Stine's "Time" magazine piece on the Millennials, the name given to this generation of teens and twenty-somethings.  He's a funny writer, so I knew it'd be entertaining.  Beyond the laughs, though, it was also spot on.  I was especially intrigued by the idea that this generation isn't particularly rebellious, in part because they have no authorities against whom to rebel.

Why is that, I wondered.  What has taken away the sting and stigma of authority for these young people?

And then it dawned on me.

Stories.

Millennials are saving themselves by telling stories.  Tiny, little stories that, thanks primarily to the Internet, now move like the breeze, digitally whispered and shared across time lines and gender lines, party lines and money lines. 

The Man has never been a big fan of storytelling, thus the reason that, throughout history, so many governments have preferred an illiterate citizenry over a well-read one.  Thank God for missionaries, who smuggled their Bibles into gaping pockets of illiterate peoples, saving them, in the end, with words as much as with The Word.

Today's missionaries--amassed under the umbrellas of Google and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook--have less-ethereal motives than their predecessors.  But their effects are just as far-reaching, if not exactly eternal.

With so many venues for sharing their stories, it is easy for the Millennials to bypass the authoritative, traditional channels offered by governments and corporations.  Now unshackled, their stories are free to travel at will, no longer suppressed by fearful authorities.

It follows, then, that where suppression is absent, oppression is much harder to find.

These kids play so well with each other because they know each other's stories so well.   And, in this atmosphere of free-flowing stories, there are no secrets anymore.  Homelessness is not "out there."  Rather, it is in the human form of Jonathon, a classmate whose family is staying at the City Mission.  Race is an outdated term, pushed aside by friends whose blood courses with swirls of Africa and Asia, Hawaii and Mexico.  This is a generation drawn with blurred lines.

Their stories have set them free, these Millennials.  And they are not afraid to share them, even if us older folks still wince at the boldness of their plot lines.