Communications Major

December 1 marks World AIDS Day. And while millenials have certainly heard of the illness and the its one-time description as the "plague", their first-hand experience with how the U.S. government and the majority of our population reacted is limited, at best. On Monday, a sizable smattering of Twitter users reacted with shock over a reposted transcript of a 1982 Reagan administration press conference at which Press Secretary Larry Speakes made a series of lighthearted jokes about AIDS. Yep, that was how AIDS was viewed in 1982, and by our government for at least the next 6 years.

"Boomers in particular like to call my generation entitled, narcissistic, and basically useless Internet addicts who are too distracted by Tumblr to get a real job (or at least, they would say that if they knew what Tumblr is). It's true that we are attached to the Internet, although so are many boomers. But the omnipresence of the Internet in many millennials' lives is shaping how we react to the world around us. And that's not necessarily a bad thing."