And they have tattoos. This generation of millennials chose to brand itself, to mark its independence of all that came before it. Nearly four in 10 have permanently inked themselves. Of those, about half have more than one tattoo.
There is no tattoo demographic: they are rich and poor, Republican and Democrat, urban and rural, of every racial category. For most of us of a different generation, there were those who got tattoos and those who didn’t, with all the judgments that it implied. It wasn’t debated, like extending a curfew or getting a new car; for kids who grew up in most suburbs, it was simply not done.
For many of us, shedding the notion that tattoos divided the world between the “good’’ kids and the more rebellious ones is difficult. But looking around - at television, at the tattoo parlors that open next to Whole Foods, at my babysitters with their discreet ankle designs - it is obvious that the millennials have taken the judgmental edge out of tattoos.
This was, after all, a generation that grew up after the Cold War, with its rigid polarities. The Soviet bloc was long gone before they got their first computer. The world had already transformed from its binary superpowers division into something safer, but, as 9/11 proved, still violent.
The terrorist attacks didn’t change the basic fact of living in a more complicated world; indeed, the resulting decade only confirmed it. America’s difficult standing and the wars we waged were consistent with the millennials’ understanding of the intricate world that they saw before them. Being for us or against us was a dramatic way to think in those early days after 9/11, but that isn’t the defining mantra for their age.
