There are many things millennials take offense to as regular Heat Street readers will know. Chief among them is the merest suggestion that they are entitled and thin-skinned.
So when Sam Kiley, the Sky News Foreign Affairs Editor wrote an article on the ‘Sky Views’ section of his TV company’s website pointing out the ways in which millennials are entitled and thin-skinned, they predictably reinforced his thesis by going apoplectic and trying to shame him, thereby neatly illustrating his point.
In his article, entitled “Thin-skinned Millennials need a spanking”, Kiley described the reaction to the death of Keith Palmer, the London policeman murdered in a terror attack in the British capital last month: “The country comes to a standstill to honour those who have been killed defending it because, these days, people of that type are so rare, so exceptional.
“Britons are no longer made of the stuff that is written in granite on the memorials to two world wars on every single village in the country. Indeed they’re not even made of the stuff of those dead young men before they went to war.”
Kiley then turned his attention to education: “Public schools are overpriced country clubs for the buttery spawn of oligarchs…no one wants to see a return to the sexual abuse that Alex Renton has revealed in his masterful exposé of private school perversion Stiff Upper Lip, but the olden day public schoolboy knew, or rather learned, what it was to get bashed then get up and play on.
“These days, the public schools can no more produce the sort of chap capable of running a large chunk of Africa at 21 with the assistance only of supernatural self-belief, and a passion for Ovid, than they can turn out a youngster capable of putting a kettle on without the supervision of a Filipina.
“As for Millennials with their thin skins, wobbly chins, and sense of immediate entitlement to unearned greatness? They just need a good spanking—and not in a fun, kinky way. Britain’s problem is that the outside world is made of sterner stuff.”
Kiley’s solution to the millennial malaise is military service. He used to be a newspaper foreign correspondent and in truth his article reads a little rushed, as though he was reading it out on TV.
He seems to throw in a reference to sexual abuse at public schools primarily to plug a pal’s book and asks for trouble with the spanking reference, not to mention his throwbacks to British Imperialism and Ovid.
But Kiley has extensively reported from the Middle East, among other global flashpoints, so he knows what he’s talking about. Someone who has seen Syrian warriors for justice at close quarters is well-placed to comment on social justice warriors.
So even if millennials don’t believe his thesis, they should listen to it. Instead they’ve taken it personally, resorting to ridicule and abuse.
The New Statesman wrote: “This time the Fearless Promoter of Unsayable Truths about how young people today are uniquely bad is Sky’s foreign editor Sam Kiley, who has written a comment piece which is almost impressive in its WTFness.”
Vice, which never needs an excuse to overreact to something with overwritten nonsense, duly obliged.
Felicity Morse at the i newspaper was one of those taking it very personally: “I took a long, hard look at my un-spanked bottom (straining my wibbly translucent chins in the mirror to do so) and realized that my response wasn’t, in fact, evidence that I was a human being with a brain, but actually signaled I was a complete failure at life.”
Sexism alert: “Perhaps I should stop taking it so personally. Perhaps he doesn’t mean me at all, because I’m a woman and all his references are to public schoolboys and to chaps. It’s not clear where female millennials fit in all of this…it is indeed my fault that this country is falling to rack and ruin.”
Kiley himself seemed bemused by the reaction, pointing out on Twitter that he was “now dangling from a noose I made for myself!”
That might be so but why do millennials continue to react in such predictable thin-skinned and entitled ways in seeking to hang anyone who dares to suggest their generation is… thin-skinned and entitled?
