Something our society does very well is put the blame on people, or groups of people. Regardless of the situation, we won’t work our way out of it until we first figure out whom to blame. Well, lately it seems that we’ve been having so many different problems that society is getting lazy. Instead of getting to the root of the issue, society keeps pointing the blame at one particular group, over and over: millennials.

Right or wrong, people are always taking shots at us. Whether it’s our sense of entitlement, our laziness, our lack of attention span, or some other not entirely relevant clause, older generations have no problem attributing one of these worn out clichés to any given problem. Personally, I have no problem ‘accepting’ the fact that we are lazy. Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s no longer up for discussion, millennials have been dubbed as ‘lazy’ so we might as well wear it.

You just have to remember, this label is coming from the generation that took two different routes to school, just so they could walk uphill both on their way to and from. So when we are working smarter instead of harder, they see laziness. But again, I am not trying to argue whether or not we are ‘lazy,’‘entitled,’ or whatever else prior generations want to call us, I am here to pin some responsibility on them.

What generations preceding millennials fail to admit is either a) they created this ‘monster’ from the very beginning, or b) they did a poor job raising us. Let me explain. Do you think we became an ‘entitled’ generation when a group of 7-year olds revolted because they did not get a participation trophy when they lost the game, or did a group of parents from the losing team come together to hand out trophies to the losers? Did society suddenly lose precious seconds if not minutes of attention span just because? Or, after years of regimented schedules created by parents who only wanted to involve their children in multiple activities, did attention spans shorten? Did we become superficial only because we wanted to or did parents who didn’t want their kids to hang out at certain places, past certain times, with certain kids, hinder our ability to interact with people we normally wouldn’t interact with.

Then again, maybe I am wrong. Maybe our parents, and our parent’s parents had nothing to do with our development, or lack thereof. But maybe they never told us ‘hey, you lost, you actually don’t deserve this medal.’ Or maybe they never told us we had to endure conversing with people we didn’t want to, like it or not. And maybe when we had a bad grade in a course, or weren’t getting enough playing time on the field, our parents tried to save the day and talk to the parent/coach for us.

So before millennials get blamed for something probably irrelevant to them, or something that had been imminent for decades, remember who raised them. Or, completely disregard this entire column and call me ‘soft.’