Make way for (and welcome) the millennials

Slow down a minute.

The Local page feature called Fast Five is a lightning bolt of information delivered each Wednesday and Friday, snapshots of some of the interesting people who live, work and play here. We ask these community members five questions and, more often than not, their responses are both illuminating and enlightening. Sometimes they’re LOL funny.

But there’s something else at work here. The Fast Five profiles, you may have noticed, focus more on younger people than do many of the other features in the newspaper. Most so far have been millennials, and that’s not by accident.

The generation of those born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 23 to 38) has been maligned, marginalized by generalizations painting them as young adults lurking in mom and dad’s basement playing video games and living vicariously through their smartphones. They’re educated but lack initiative, this unflattering painting shows; their sense of self-worth is inflated and their immersion in entitlement all-consuming.

Well, Fast Five is blowing that picture to pieces.

Readers are seeing hardworking, socially conscious and community-active citizens doing their damnedest to make their way in a world that’s changing at light speed, far more frenetically than at any time in history. They are not unlike the rest of us in important ways: They want a good job, a nice place to live, time to recreate; good schools for the kids they have or will have; amenities that reward their hard work.

They want to make a positive impact on their surroundings.

They want to be happy.

We’ve added this feature not just to augment the traditional fare that older, loyal newspaper readers expect, but to at least crack open the door in one more way to the inevitable changing of the guard. It’s inevitable because, don’t you know, this year millennials are projected to overtake baby boomers as the largest population generation in our nation.

As these dynamic local men and women are showing, their rise to power isn’t just a good thing. It’s probably overdue.