Stop, Drop & Roll: A Generation on Fire?

I came across this funny meme the other day depicting what one should do when on fire--stop, drop, and roll--accompanied by the caption "This led me to believe catching on fire would be a much more frequent problem in life."


I laughed, recalling my own determined evasion of imaginary flames as a kid. But having spent the last month fine-tuning the reading list for the course associated with this blog--Contemporary Issues in U.S. Politics--I was dogged by the thought that the same generation that would recognize and laugh at this image* caught on fire some time ago. 

I'm speaking of the "Millennial" generation, those coming of age in the new millennium. There is a lot of speculation about this generation's "character" and trajectory. To be frank, much of it looks bad. Consider these attempts to capture the essence of the millennial generation: generation Y bother (a play on the benign if banal gen Y), the screwed generation, the entitled generation, the boomerang generation (an allusion to the fact that Millennials are increasingly returning to parental homes), the go-nowhere generation, and generation fucked.

Some of the folks coining these names seem to figure Millennials as a generation that bumbled into the flames of the "real world," distracted or misdirected by some combination of parental coddling, materialism, and technophilia. Others paint a picture that looks more like an ambush, with Millennials hemmed in by previous generations' (in)actions that culminated, for example, in the "Great Recession" and the not-great-enough-to-deserve-a-catchy-name recovery that defines our present moment.

The Hunger Games, Gary Ross (dir.), Lionsgate, 2012.

If this is beginning to sound terribly depressing, hang in there--good things come from or, at least through, fire. Like brick oven pizza:). And, more to the point, people are increasingly attending to the ways in which Millennials are adapting, disrupting and responding creatively to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Pursuing a fantastical tangent, we might recall The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen--"the girl on fire"--who sparks a revolution against an unjust state of affairs and ask: Where or who are the sparks today? And how might these sparks interact with technologies so frequently seen as cyborg-like appendages to the Millennial generation? Some have already proposed answers to these questions.

It seems, then, that Millennials are both faced with existing fires (upon which they are sometimes charged with throwing gas) and tasked with creating their own sparks (the ignition of which they are expected to direct and control). How do we make sense of these disparate views? And what's at stake in these different representations of a generation? These are the sorts of questions students and other contributors will wrestle with on this blog. 

In short, we propose to fight with flames--to ask which of the fires Millennials are said to face are real and which imaginary, which destructive and which productive and, finally, what we can and should do as a generation on fire. 


*Fun fact: The "stop, drop & roll" safety technique seems to have come into regular use in the latter part of the 1970s after the passage in 1974 of the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act (see: About the U.S. Fire Administration) which funded PSAs like those by Dick Van Dyke. It's usage in popular culture--in songs by NEXT, Eminem and the Bravery (to name just a few), and on TV programs like The Simpsons--suggests it's achieved somewhat of an iconic status.