After a few months, I'm finally decompressed. I was sick for about 7 weeks, probably some exotic version of the flu I caught in Danville, a more depressing version of the flu or an upper respiratory infection or some shit. I'm 100% home. I'm going to 100 level science classes at ICC during the day, which, if I let it get to me, would be incredibly depressing because I'm spending every day with 18-22 year old people. The Millennials everyone my age dread. Truly, they are entitled, annoying, over-indulged, and incapable of recognizing responsibility. But they're not all bad. I have seen a remarkable thing over these past few weeks.
When I was their age, I could never be described as racist. I didn't care what color people were, I just wanted to meet people who were cool to me. But the social segregation was still there. Black kids hung out in one place, Latinos in another, Whites in another. It's not like that anymore. I stopped and stepped back today in Environmental Biology today and watched the way people interacted. The 18-20 year old kids now don't consider skin color at all. And not in the sanctimonious way a lot of liberals in my generation think of that statement. They literally don't care. There are two young ladies who, in 1997, would've hung out at "The Ledge", with all of us who wore black and Doc Marten boots all the time and were angry about being white middle class milquetoasts with clever t-shirts and sarcasm. They formed a lab group with two kind, funny, awkward black men. And from watching them, race never even entered their minds. It was refreshing as fuck. I see it every day in the halls of ICC. Racial boundaries don't exist with the younger generation anymore. It makes me proud to be a human being.
