I don’t understand these people called Millennials. They are of a genus and species foreign to me.

For those even more in the dark than myself, Millennials are people born from 1980-2000.

They’re also known as Generation Y because they followed Generation X – another group I’ve never understood. In fact, the last time I had a grip on things was in 1970, when I just got out of high school and knew everything.

These Millennials are not at all like me, a Baby Boomer. They stare at their phones all day and half the night and type with their thumbs.

To the Millennials, a hot rod is a Honda with a bad muffler.

They like soccer, don’t read books and are perfectly comfortable in a home without bookshelves, or anything to go on them.

I couldn’t live like that. What really bothers me is they have no need or desire for any of the things Baby Boomers spent our lives collecting – like my extensive motel stationery collection that was going to finance our retirement.

It also saddens me that the Millennials prefer chicken to beef and like to eat raw fish. Yet, they don’t actually like to fish. Or hunt.

They don’t appear to have a working knowledge of tools like the hammer and the pipe wrench, and to them the most important thing in life is the number of Facebook “friends” they’ve never met.

When I was a kid, your 16th birthday was huge. It meant you could get your driver’s license. Many 16-year-old Millennials couldn’t care less. They’ll wait in line for three days to get the latest gadget from Apple but not one hour for a driver’s license.

Some Millennial youngsters show rabbits and turkeys at the county fair, for goshsakes. In my day they’d have been laughed out of FFA. And instead of placing last, or even first, they got a participatory ribbon so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings.

They don’t mow lawns or have summer jobs because that might interfere with their summer trip to Borneo to build houses, or to teach English (or what passes for English these days).

Generation Y in general is extremely liberal; they believe in same-sex marriage, want to legalize dope and are green, green, green.

They’re dead broke, aren’t in any rush to get married and still speak with their parents a couple times per day while in college! Heck, I didn’t do that when I was eight years old and still living at home.

Speaking of home, half of Millennials move back home after graduating from college.

To them, their childhood bedroom will always be MySpace.

They get really excited about things that leave me cold, like social networking, video games, Tweeting and blogging. The Millennials say they want their very own individual identity, so they’re all getting pierced and tattooed.

I suppose it’s natural, these feelings of mine. My grandpa never understood my generation either – and, quite frankly, neither did I.

Why a bunch of them wanted to go to Woodstock, roll around in the mud, use filthy outhouses and contract venereal disease just to listen to a drug addict play a guitar with his teeth is beyond me.

But at least the music was actually music and people sang, even if the lyrics were goofy and unintelligible.

I feel guilty as a Baby Boomer because of the country we’ve left Generation Y. They’ll be paying our debts forever.

Polls show they put lifestyle and friends above work – which is a good thing, because there aren’t many good jobs anyway. At least not any that would pay off the $100,000 they borrowed for college. That’s why they are waiting tables part-time at Olive Garden.

The 80 million Millennials generally are risk-averse, they abuse fewer drugs and alcohol than my generation and they don’t care for dirty politics or politicians. They are not easy to B.S. and are the best-educated generation in history.

The IQ of 100 of best of the Millennials, I’m quite sure, is higher than the combined IQ of the 400,000 or so people who gathered at Woodstock. They are civic-minded and deeply depressed about polar bears and global warming.

Trust me on this, Millennials – the polar bears will be just fine. You’ve got bigger problems to worry about.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers may log on to www.LeePittsbooks.com to order any of Lee Pitts’ books. Those with questions or comments for Lee may write to him in care of this publication.