‘Just another case of Trump Pox”, sighed my teaching colleague. I’d been muttering over the effect of the election on our poor students. From Ahmed (Yemeni busboy) to Zaiyra (Honduran cleaner) they were freaking. And now, as though this lousy 2016 hasn’t Trumped us enough, Carrie Fisher has died – and Bowie, Harper Lee, Prince, Ali, Gene Wilder, Gwen Ifill, Leonard Cohen, Castro, Zsa Zsa, Princess Leia and her mother, too.
On the Left Coast we blame it all on The Donald. As we brace ourselves for another gruelling jog around the sun in 2017, we remain defiant.
From Seattle to San Diego, mayors and governors and police chiefs have sworn to give “La Migra”, or the immigration cops, the middle finger. We’re the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” over here. Regularly reminded to register and vote by Facebook, our voters gave Hillary the highest margin and highest turnout ever, almost 90 per cent of registered voters.
I should explain that I’m a San Francisco community college teacher of English as a second language.
Sometimes undocumented and at risk, my students can be refugees or asylum cases, veterans, and even homeless people. Occasionally my mission is to reassure them, quoting Barack Obama’s disclaimer, “the presidency isn’t a speedboat, it’s an ocean liner”. Even presidents can’t force us to force our cops to enforce, adds California’s governor, Jerry Brown.
Super-coding libertarian
Still calm, because they don’t consume newspapers, radios or TV news, but do take afternoon naps, are those super-coding libertarian millennials from Google, Facebook and Apple.
Born between 1982 and 1995, they may earn five figures out of college but fear they’ll never pay off college loans or buy a home. These easily mocked, plaid-clad, biking, dog-loving, shorts-in-winter-wearing twentysomethings have invaded my adopted city and upped rents and antes.
Among their critics is Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who told PBS Newshour, "A new brand of dot.com millionaires and Silicon Valley money moved into San Francisco with bags full of cash and no manners and very little education in the great culture of Western civilisation."
Well then, isn't it high time for a biting TV satire about two self-absorbed millennial hipsters who rent a one-bedroom near the Twitter HQ at $3,500 per month? In episode one, our Adam and Eve flee the East Coast (Too hot! Too cold!) and get testy all over Market Street because homeless guys are panhandling them and their half-finished Lego-set apartment building is sinking. Then Adam and Eve suffer a cruel blow after their corner Taqueria Loco is raided by the immigration cops and faithful counter hands Luis and Juanita and busboy Jesus get deported. Adios, tacos con carnitas.
Cruellest of all, Adam’s scarlet Beat earphones vanish on the F line streetcar. He accuses a homeless man of pickpocketing, the guy punches him and both get thrown off by the bus driver.
Thermal underwear
But there’s an upside to Millennials. So far: fewer cars, and of those only hybrid cars; Gucci bikes, so less traffic; dogs; ethnic food carts; fun bars; and AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, and other “gig economy ” conveniences. They like thermal Japanese underwear and rubber messenger bags, but that’s as naughty as it gets.
With one swanky bar after another, they’re upgrading the Tenderloin, and the new “poke” bars (Hawaiian sushi bars, pronounced “poke-ee”) are rocking mid-Market food halls. Food carts and halls liven up downtown where porn theatres once malingered. And they do love naps and board games.
But do millennials have hearts or souls? Jealous baby boomers say no, only phones and Tweets and Instagrams. Yet though they don’t read newspapers, they do get news – fake and real – from tweets, phones, and sites like Politico or Slate, or spoof sites.
The problem is that fake news sounds convincing, while real news seems more ludicrous. Concerned about this, Oakland's libraries have won free unlimited access to the New York Times, plus a few thousand home subscriptions for patrons. This can only be a good thing, though I wish they'd add the crosswords.
Embrace changes
Still, millennials can be benign and they’re helping us embrace changes, like the sinister, almost silent cars that sneak up on one. And drones. (On Christmas Eve a shiny pink drone was flying to my gate. It was twilight and for a second I thought it was Tinkerbell bringing a Christmas gift.)
Oh, and they have babies, another benign effect. Parenthood makes millennials – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for example – sprout empathy and give away billions to hospitals and low-income housing. As libertarians, they adored Bernie. But they knew on what side their brioche was buttered.
At a recent millennial dinner party, I dropped the loaded word “entitled” into the conversation. Unsurprisingly this word makes them bristle, because it’s used by jealous baby boomers who consider them spoiled. Luckily we were soon talking about the Tower of Power band, and what my writer pal Kathryn Cassidy calls “the age of the individualisation of interests”, and then we played board games.
Spoiled? Nope. Later I wondered about Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s postwar Beat pals, and how spoiled they were when they were twentysomethings. The 97-year-old poet scorns millennials and complains of a “soulless group of people”, too busy with their phones to “be here in the moment”. But the Beats were luckier.
Ferlinghetti landed here after studying in Paris on the GI Bill, and found a huge studio in North Beach for $29 per month. It was “a city small enough for human conviviality and large enough for a metropolitan sensibility”, he thought.
Like all generational clashes and clichés, the divide is really about the fact someone younger is having more fun.
Give this town another decade, and Generation Z will be annoying the crap out of the millennials.