Chuck Zumbrun

Tales from Skunk Hill

My g-g-g-generation

Fort Wayne used to have two newspapers. The News-Sentinel, the Republican newspaper, published in the afternoon, and the Journal-Gazette, the Democratic newspaper, published in the morning. Both were managed by the same parent company, Fort Wayne Newspapers.

I used to get both, but back in the late 1990’s when the Republican party went from being the party of small government and low taxes to the party of telling people who they could marry, xenophobia, and objectivism [1] I dropped the News-Sentinel because their editorial content had followed the party and had become too stupid to let into my house.

Fast forward to 2017 and the News-Sentinel has folded. Despite being in the reddest of red states, not enough people would buy it for them to be able to pay for paper and ink. So they stopped printing. But since they’re run by the same parent company, evidently the now unemployed and unemployable editors of the News-Sentinel needed work, so Fort Wayne Newspapers decided to include their opinion pieces in the Journal-Gazette.

Today they ran a piece by Kevin Leininger [2] about the woe that will befall us when the millennials come of age.

Will millennials’ views on God, economics threaten even Thanksgiving?

This piece of garbage will gag any thinking human being, so in the event you can’t get through it, let me summarize: the millennials, those born from the 1980’s through the early 2000’s, are godless socialists who are going to turn America into a Soviet gulag, or maybe even Sweden.

Well, Leininger can have his ignorance and his paranoia. I see a different a world.

I work in the computer biz, so I work with millennials every day. I’ve been working recently with high school kids doing a web design competition[3] .

Web Design Poster from TechFest

And the kids are all right. They bring such passion and enthusiasm to their work. These high schools kids do such good work it makes me embarrassed to remember what I did at their age.

And unlike Kevin Leininger they want the world to be a better place: healthier, cleaner, fairer, inclusive.

I’m 60 years old and getting ready to step off the stage, and I couldn’t be more pleased to hand it off to these kids.

1. I.e., they went off the rails on a crazy train.

Crazy, but that’s how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it’s not too late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate

Even Ozzy sounds wise compared to the Republican party these days.

2. A “pompous strutting blowhard” from reputable sources.

3. You can see my company’s logo in the bottom right of the poster. My boss, Linda Passmore, is the best and gave me time off to do this.

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