Millenials! So short-sighted! So dramatic!

I try to remain hopeful, I really do, that the coming generations will have something special to offer our world. I think they will— but they’re going to have to pay some dues along the way. And dues are something, in my experience, the millenials don’t like to pay.

I’ll leave out the conversation about why I think that’s the case. Smarter people than I are on that, and can probably explain it in sociology of it more completely than I will ever understand. But if this woman is a hero to the millennials, then my faith that they will eventually come around is shaken.

Here's the short version of the story: A would-be broker is hired as personal assistant and is, after two years, sexually harassed by her boss, but instead of going to the authorities, she quits dramatically by emailing her resignation letter via key points delivered through a ‘clever’ series of photographs of white board messages.

Of course, I don’t believe it’s a real story. the site that hosts the photos' claim to fame is hoax. Whoever they are, they are not to be trusted as a resource. (And I mean hoax in the lame-internet sense of hoax, which in beter days might have been called “told fairly transparent lies to national media outlets.” )

But if it’s not real, why is my faith in the millennials shaken? Fictional or otherwise, this girl’s resignation is heralded as heroic by millennials and that's sad. What this girl, fictional or otherwise, is doing is not heroic. It’s stupid. And unnecessarily dramatic. And short-sighted. She’s throwing her future as "a broker" a way to gamble on a short-lived internet meme.

There are laws and policies designed to protect this girl. She has a right to seek justice within the system to make her point. The women who have endured this sort of thing in the past and will endure it again have made hard choices so that she has options withinthe system.

She could have done something that would have made the world better for everyone, not just her. But instead, she opted for vigilanteism. She takes the law into her own hands and instead of building a case for the dismissal of the offending supervisor in a documentable way that would have long term implications for the better of all of her fellow employees, she breaks information policy, network policy, and — judging from the pictures — dress code, for the sake of a short-term revenge payoff.

It’s foolish to take the easy way out and provide vigilante justice in a dramatic way. It cheapens all of us. I hope you really are going to be 'just fine,' internet meme girl. Somehow, I don't think there is much hope, but I will hold to providence that you will find your way.