When I started volunteering as a guitar teacher with various branches of Girls Rock Camp in New York City and Atlanta several years ago, I was slowly introduced to this kind of, I believe people call it, Gen Z culture of kindness. Where we respectfully ask people their pronouns and don’t put pressure on people to do things they don’t like. (As an instructor, I had no idea how much pressure it can be to ask an 11 year old, “What’s your favorite band?”) Around the same time I watched this new version of 21 Jump Street where Channing Tatum goes back to high school as an undercover cop and all the “cool” things of the past like picking on people and laughing at them were suddenly, well uncool. It made me laugh but I had to admit what I was seeing amongst the group at rock camp, and the people I would meet in graduate school at UNO, that being outright cruel was just not tolerable in any way shape or form.

Admittedly, sometimes I would find myself rolling my eyes at the various pastel memes that started popping up discussing mental health issues, politeness, etc. I was open to hearing what my new friends had to say but I grew up around some brutally ruthless teens (wreckage from the Southwest Philadelphia migration) where the motto was Only the Strong Survive.

The person writing this is a Millennial – not sure exactly what Generation I am in but I grew up with Britney Spears. Well, not like I physically and emotionally grew up alongside her but I grew up with her constant presence as a part of my life. Even as a goth high schooler who was in a Hole cover band, I could not deny the infectiousness of her music and even though my instincts said I should envy this Bambi-eyed beauty, I could not help but like her in spite of myself. I would cringe, though, seeing her cosmetically enhanced teen body splayed out on a bed on the cover of Rolling Stone or feel slighted when MTV V-jays (slang for video-jockeys)  would try and trip up her intelligence on national television. The joke was always on Britney, even when she shaved her head and was screaming for help.

Just like my personal hero Kurt Cobain who came from an obscure town no one had heard of (Aberdeen, Washington) and was catapulted to international fame, Britney Jean Spears went from Kentwood, Louisiana to worldwide superstardom while handling puberty. I couldn’t even pass gym class let alone tour the world under the nonstop scrutiny of the media as a teen girl. As an adult male, Kurt Cobain obviously, and sadly, was not suited for it. Don’t even get me started on the sad similarities between Britney and Whitney Houston.

Today I saw this Tweet that many people I know (my age, younger and older): “When are we going to talk about Gen Z becoming so hyper aware from discourse that they’ve actually became pure and puritanical.” And I’ve been thinking about it all day.

 

I don’t know that I can say I 100 percent agree or disagree with the sentiment, after all, I feel nuance is something entirely lacking in the world today. I frequently copy Joan Didion’s words into my journal: “When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something … but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen.”

But watching the New York Times Britney Spears documentary last week, although harrowing and sad, actually made me smile. Those Gen Z kids, with all their memes and pastels and swirly fonts have made a difference. It certainly is not The New York Times who made it apparent that treating women like Britney Spears as laughable sex pots is not ok.

It was the patience of those tenderhearted Gen Zers (and I’m not saying all of you!) that kept saying, “We are humans. Let’s not act this way to one another. Be kind.” They are the ones who you can credit for the movement to free Britney Spears of her father’s conservatorship.

For once, it does appear that killing them with kindness is working.