By Meghan Peterson, Ph.D.
November is one of the most beautiful months here in New England. Your response, understandably so, might be: “Are you joking?”
It is past peak. The leaves are down on the pale ground; or the lonely remaining ones in the trees have become a putrid brown. What am I talking about? The woods look sparse and desolate.
This is precisely why I embrace the mid to late-autumn months. After the gorgeous foliage has exited nature’s stage, no other distractions take attention away from the trees. Specifically, November ushers in a beautiful, extended study of THE TREE. Exquisite, ordinary, narrow, thick, tall, short, dying, alive. The bare tree stands – in its own spotlight.
Recently, a relative noticed that I was staring at the trees in our now-exposed woods (remember, no more leaves to distract the eyes!) and asked me, “Do you know the story of the Pitch Pine Tree?” The look I made gave my answer away. I did not know the story. But I needed to know it. “Well,” this relative said, “Pitch Pines can only release seedlings after they have been exposed to fire.” I was hooked. Life born of fire? Quite a concept: the arbor version of the mythological bird, the Phoenix. I did some research on the Pitch Pine, the pinus rigida[1], and here is what I found:
Pitch pines are dependent on fire and must be carefully managed with fire to assure that the ecosystem provides habitat. Prescribed fire is an important management tool for healthy, productive and safe pitch pine forests.[2]
Pitch pine…has evolved the unique ability to survive fire even if all of the needles are destroyed by the fire. It withstands fire because of its thick protective bark; its ability to re-sprout rapidly; its wide-spreading root system; and the buds lying dormant in the trunk that are stimulated to grow by fire. Even when all of the needles on a pitch pine are burned, the crown can recover and be almost back to normal in just a few years.[3]
As a millennial and part-time observer of my peers, I am intrigued at the idea that growth and life can occur as direct results of something as awe-inducing and devastating as fire. Fire is something that can destroy; it is something that can kill. But it is also something that can offer warmth (“chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”) or provide a necessary remedy (cauterizing a wound to stanch bleeding).
My generation neither likes nor handles well the uneasiness, challenges, difficulties, obstacles and tests that litter life like an obstacle course. Millennials have a hard time dealing with life’s fires. Millennials do not want to experience one iota of discomfort. They believe that life can – and should – be purged of its tribulations, its offenses, its irregularities, its lack of clarity. Why? Because millennials have been raised on what I call the “doctrine of grievance.” Have an issue with someone? Label them a racist, misogynist, bigot. Have an issue with a viewpoint? Label it offensive or hateful. Have an issue with an organization (private or corporate; governmental or non-profit)? Critique it for not being sufficiently diverse. These responses are constitutive elements in the “doctrine of grievance,” whereby any hint of discomfort, challenge, or difficulty requires disposal in order to preserve the acutely sensitive sensibilities of the millennial human.
It is, therefore, fitting that the millennial generation has earned the title of “The Most Anxious Generation.”[4] Millennials are anxious about everything and everyone they encounter in life. At any point in life, there is the potential fire, calamity, crisis which needs to be immediately eliminated – no…prevented. Such anxieties come to fruition as illustrated below:
You cannot hold a class debate among millennials or, for that matter, today’s college students (Generation Z) because anxiety levels are at such a point that contact with ideas, facts and truths they find troubling will lead to cognitive and emotional discrepancies (that is, what they hear and see in life is not what they have been taught) they cannot bear.
The idea that millennials and their younger cohort cannot hear, see or experience anything slightly difficult, as doing so will result in greater anxiety, overwhelming worry, and personal paralysis.
The idea that college campus guest speakers or comedians get disinvited because their personas or personal belief systems are potentially offensive. Recently, comedienne Sara Silverman (herself no enemy of the millennial liberal mainstream) recently described social conditions as “the cancel culture.”[5]
Such instances have less to do with laziness than they do with the unrealistic desire of avoiding the fires of truth – of experiencing and facing facts in their de-foliaged form. For the millennial specimen, it is less about the fear of taking offense than it is knowing at one’s core that truths, stripped of their saccharine rallying cries – “Girl, you’re amazing! Man, you rock! You’ve so got this! You got this thing on lock!” There are times when we do not “so got this.” There are times when we do not “have this thing [life] on lock” (translation: we “get” it; we know how to live our life). There are times when we are not amazing and when we do not rock. Recognizing, understanding, and indeed owning up to, these personal lows are vital for improvement, growth, and the pursuit of thinking, doing, and being better.
Millennials fear truth’s fires may one day destroy and render unusable their highly-manicured belief system that, to no fault of their own, has been stylized for them in great part by permissive yet neglectful parents; indulgent yet totalitarian educational curricula. And so millennials have constructed the cancel culture in tandem with the grievance doctrine. The grievance (based on perception of racism, bigotry, misogyny, sexism, and the like) necessitates cancellation of the speaker and speech. Again, this cancel culture is less about being offended – despite justifications citing sensitivity concerns. Instead, this millennial culture centers on the fear of being wrong, of having tempting falsities vanish as quickly as a status update on Facebook. If we as millennials were really candid, we would say that our anxieties are not about the unknown. Rather, they are about the certitude of truth and not knowing what to do with it.
The above-described cultural byproducts are what we obtain when a generation of adults (now themselves becoming parents) is raised on a highly processed conceptual diet of “Everyone is a star and gets a star.” “Diversity is an end in and of itself – diversity is amazing because diversity is amazing” (the tautological fallacy inherent to an illogical, circular premise). Millennials have been educated to care about how we look (are we able to check off the gender identity/expression, sex, race, ethnicity, victim, socioeconomic box?) more than about what we do.
Maybe the realities and travails of life necessitate a little fire now and then. Recall the Pitch Pines: “Pitch pines are dependent on fire and must be carefully managed with fire to assure that the ecosystem provides habitat. Prescribed fire is an important management tool for healthy, productive and safe pitch pine forests.”
Perhaps the Pitch Pines have it right: rejuvenation, growth – life itself – follow fire. As you enter this cool season, enjoy those festive fires. They may just be the thing we need right now – millennials and non-millennials alike.
[1] https://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/pinrig/all.html
[2] http://njforestry.org/wp-content/uploads/FN2-05-2011-Pitch-Pine-Mark.pdf
[3] Ibid.
[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/i-hear-you/201907/why-are-millennials-so-anxious-and-unhappy
[5] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2019-08-12/sarah-silverman-cancel-culture-blackface
Photo of pine in public domain. Millennial Scrabble credit: https://speedpropertybuyers.co.uk
