Dormouse559 wrote: ↑20 Aug 2018 03:10
The article says millennials are drinking more wine than other generations, not that they drink more wine than beer.
Well, I was thinking of this line: "Obtaining alcohol for consumption is no exception, and the millennial beverage of choice is wine."
I'd also hesitate to apply this information years in the past to high schoolers. (The article says its statistics are for 2015.)
This brings up an interesting point. In the late nineties, my peers were basically copying Gen-X culture. Listening to artists like the Offspring, Third Eye Blind, Alanis Morissette and Sarah McLachlan, partaking in extreme sports, drinking beer, raving, getting body piercing (the last of which would later prove as permanent as blue jeans instead of a temporary nineties fad). In social/political views, however, the first Millennials represented a break from the Reagan conservatism of eighties youth or the Clinton-voting Xers of the early nineties. Every year, my high school history/gov class would hold a reënactment of the Eugene Debs Trial, and the teacher asked the jurors to rule the way a teen-age Californian from the late nineties would instead of trying to be historically accurate. My 1979-born peers were the first class in the history of Mr. Hart's class that ruled in Debs' favor (not guilty). (Mr. Hart also explained that we rewrote history, as in the real Eugene Debs trial Mr. Debs was convicted.) We were called Generation Y, a sort of minor variation on Generation X. By the end of the decade, even the oldest American Millennials were too young to legally purchase at a bar.
In the current decade, the eleventies, on the other hand, the whole Millennial thing came out on its own, and this was when "Millennials" became a household word. Now media talk about Millennials all the time, how we're "disrupting" various industries and machines, and how we'd rather eat avocado toast than spend our money to settle down (while Xers, conversely,
are settling down or have already). They ascribe to us some decidedly un-X-like traits, such as being soft snowflakes instead of tough realists; politically earnest and leftist instead of cynical and pragmatist; optimistic instead of pessimistic about the future of the world and the planet; helicopter-parented instead of thrown on the streets and neglected by parents;
soi-disant "special" instead of self-loathing; giving free hugs instead of being standoffish. Whether or not all of you agree with these assessments (of Millennials or of Xers), America woke up and realized:
Millennials are not Xers. The oldest Millennials are in our late thirties now, soon to be middle-aged. The youngest are in junior high.
2007-2008 was a sort of in-between zone. The first recognition of the nascent Millennial spirit by the public that I noticed was in 2001, when my high school and college peers accused Bush of being oil-hungry instead of falling in line with the jingoistic mood shared by most non-Millennial Americans after 9/11. Such earlier events as the Battle of Seattle and Napster began to look like harbingers of all this in retrospect. Then when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, many different generations protested the war, including many Silents, but I saw a lot of "This generation is coming of age protesting a war like the Boomers instead of being like Gen X!!!" I even saw one blog entry that suggested generations alternate between conservative (Silent, Gen X) and liberal (Boomer, "Gen Y") . Then came MySpace and Facebook, and I began to hear people complain that these new kids couldn't write music the way Generation X did -- the new music, everyone was saying, was terrible! Jean Twenge wrote
Generation Me, popularizing the idea that teens and twentysomethings couldn't adapt to a cold, hard world and had grown up constantly told they were special. There was a media furore over the victorious college women's lacrosse team greeting Junior in their flip-flops. Iraq loomed on with no end in sight, and older liberals criticized youth for not protesting the war the way young Boomers would have, while older conservatives criticized youth for not rallying around the president the way young Greatests would have. In 2007, Barack Obama was becoming a major celebrity, a "rock star politician", and the book
Generation We was written. During this decade, Millennials were clearly forming a voice -- and a popular culture (emo, anyone?) -- separate from Generation X, but we were still called "Generation Y" by most people. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Parkland school shooting, the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the word "disruptive" applied positively, flipsters, and avocado toast were still in the future. Few people had heard of Antifa.
My musical is set right at that point in the 2007-2008 school year, when the oldest Millennials were 28-29, and the youngest were still preschoolers. So perhaps I should stick with beer. After all, in the late nineties, I was drinking beer, vodka and Drambuie.
I'd try to answer your central question, having been a millennial in high school at about that time, but I'm like Axiem; I didn't try alcohol until 21.
Well, thanks for
trying to help.