Between the early 1980s and today, over 3.5 billion people were born, making up over half of the world's current population. In the same period a great deal else has happened, as well: we have transitioned from the Cold War mentality which dominated much of the world for decades prior; AIDS has gone from being a scary blip on the radar of doctors and certain segments of the community to one of the most familiar and widely-ravaging epidemics in history; advanved technology has leapt from the pages of George Orwell and Robert Heinlein to our back pockets, with over 71% of Americans, and as much as 85% of American Millenials, owning smartphones. These are developments around which the youth of 2015 has grown and they have shaped our worldview into something utterly unimaginable as recently as 35 years ago.
The preceding generation often does not understand, or even acknowledge, the shifts in culture that have occurred. Having spoken at length about social, political, and economic topics with parents, their friends, and many of my friends' parents, I have noticed a trend among many of them of perceiving today's forward-thinking youth as mere extensions of their movements of backlash against their own parents' society. To a certain extent, this is true, but it is incomplete and does not grasp the level of change which has taken place. Though most of this generation is certainly more enlightened and aware of global issues than those which came before it, there still exist remnants of the conditioning under which they were raised that pervade their worldview no matter how well-intentioned they may be. As a self-identified feminist, I am often surprised by the number of people older than I am who still believe that feminism is concerned solely with breaking down the limits placed on women by their social upbringings; there are 3.5 billion people who are more likely to believe that the limitations placed on men are also damaging and in need of a revolution.
We are a cosmopolitan generation which has evolved beneath the loom of videogames and personal computers, but 3.5 billion of us are able to understand that technological advancement need not, and can not, take the place of humanity. We have seen firsthand the awesome power of social media as a tool of mass communication and coordination for major cultural revolutions, but we are also well aware that those revolutions required actual person-to-person interaction. There are 3.5 billion people today who understand that the Arab Spring and the Ferguson and Baltimore protests have been promoted with technology, but made possible by humanity.
