Commentary: Avoiding stereotypes about Generation Y

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Just in case you’ve been reading this paper for the last fifteen years and haven’t noticed yet, I’m a total civil procedure dork.

As such, I’m invited, from time to time, to talk about civ pro at CLE programs. A couple weeks ago, having a couple hours to kill after a presentation before the next train left Chicago for Milwaukee, I decided to listen to the speaker who followed me on the program while he talked about how jurors from Generation Y (defined by Wikipedia as those born between 1980 and 1995) differ from older ones.

He was a sharp and informative fellow. By his own admission, doesn’t know a thing about law, but he makes his living as a jury consultant. His talk was about the chasm between the stereotypes and the realities of young people, and how to best get your message across to them as a trial attorney.

I must confess my own personal bias — my opinion of Generation Y is rather high compared to most cats my age. I think that they have very good values and that the things they want from life are good things. When I talk to young people, and recall what disgusting animals we were when we were young, I am impressed by them.

Admittedly, many have shortcomings in their work ethic. But consider the circumstances. When I was a kid, I had paper routes and caddied. I’ve been a busboy, a groundskeeper and a landscaper.

Today, newspapers are delivered by underemployed adults with cars; golfers take carts instead of walking; and immigrants, rather than college students, maintain the country club’s golf course and the shopping mall’s green areas.

When I was young, the minimum wage was peanuts; but you worked hard and you got raises quickly. Today, the minimum wage is a bar to employment, especially for teenagers.

And so the old people blame the young people for having no work ethic and ignore the obvious — they are the ones who created a society in which there is very little opportunity for young people to develop that work ethic.

Anyway, the other night, I watched some television commercials during an ESPN college basketball marathon (Duke sure does look good, don’t you think?). Every commercial I saw during a particular break in the action clearly had young men as its target audience.

Yet in every commercial, every young man was portrayed like a bum. To quote the late, great, Jack Kemp, “Winning is like shaving; if you don’t do it every day, you look like a bum.”

There was one fellow in a car commercial who was supposed to be some kind of prodigy surgeon, but he was too ineffectual to either shave himself or know what kind of car he wanted. In another commercial, some loser with a three-day-stubble told his girlfriend he would sooner let her fall off a cliff rather than lose his bottle of beer.

Needless to say, these corporations have squandered millions of dollars insulting the very audience to which they wanted to appeal.

Granted, you could probably put all the people behind those commercials into a room together, and the collective lot has probably never read a book worth the paper it was printed on. But, they are supposed to be keeping their ears to the ground and staying up on all the latest trends; yet they were grossly malfeasant in making these commercials.

We, on the other hand, are the bookworms. We got where we are in this life based on intellect.

I’m sure that no attorney, faced with an entire jury under the age of 30, would deliberately treat them as ineffectual and useless buffoons, as the advertising community does. Nevertheless, we should still be asking ourselves, “What false stereotypes and misconceptions about them do we harbor?”