Branded by 9/11, those tattooed millennials offer hope for the future
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The dreaded week has arrived, filled with attempts to come to grips with the lives lost on 9/11 and the nation we became. The usual cast of characters -- the widows and warriors, the diplomats and journalists -- provide varying analytical bookends to this decade of war. But the real constituents of 9/11 are heard from less, even though they will carry their lessons further into the future.
Something happened on the way to Kabul, Baghdad and Guantanamo. A generation grew up. Call them the 9/11 generation, those born after 1980 who came of age in the new millennium. They are, according to a Pew Research Center study of demographic trends, more diverse, more connected, more educated and more tolerant than the rest of us.
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.
First Published September 11, 2011 12:00 am
