We’re an apathetic generation? I protest.
The holidays in my family are times of giving and receiving insults about our political views. Ferocious barbs are slung between dinner-table courtesies: “If you think the surge is working, then you’re even dumber than I thought. More stuffing?” Otherwise-delightful meals dissolve into the bellowing, fist-pounding brawls normally reserved for gorilla exhibits. At most dinners, one question comes up that I’m sure many students my age have to face every year: “Why doesn’t your generation care what’s going on in the world?”
It’s a loaded question. After all, I personally care a great deal, but I can’t care vicariously for 20 million people. And why should I be my generation’s keeper? I don’t ask my dad why his generation insists on screwing up the U.S. government, the mortgage market, the energy industry and the environment. I don’t ask my grandmother why AARP members clutch to a calcified Social Security policy that shifts the burden of Social Security taxes onto their grandkids. Maybe I should respond, “Dearest family, my generation will start caring about this country when your generations are ready to pass down a country worth caring about.”
But that’s a pretty obnoxious answer for the dinner table, and I don’t want any cranberry sauce hurled at me. What the folks are really asking isn’t “why don’t you care” but rather “why don’t we see you caring?” Our generation doesn’t take to the streets as readily as the 1960s protesters. We don’t march under wide banners down Main Street as our professors did (and still do).
One month ago, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman called us Generation Q, the quiet generation. Friedman isn’t angry, just disappointed that college kids today don’t flock to the streets like the little songbirds of liberalism we should be. After all, he says, that’s what twentysomethings are for—to represent the radical, politically enraged id of our national identity. “Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms,” Friedman wrote. “Activism can only be uploaded the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power.”
But Friedman got it backward. King and Kennedy advanced civil rights and social welfare precisely because they weren’t young voters. They were established political figures who changed the world by recognizing that radicalism isn’t just a wild oat to sow in youth. They understood that the nation cannot pass on the responsibility to be radical to young people. It was political power that gave King and Kennedy a bullhorn to speak truth to the people, and it was leverage that turned their radicalism into a reality.
Protests, on the other hand, are all bullhorn and no leverage. To be sure, some sit-ins and street demonstrations in the early ’60s nudged the country toward racial equality, but the vast majority either failed to effect change or proved counterproductive. In 1968, the violent protests outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago made the Democratic Party’s membership look like a hoard of savages. Richard Nixon channeled the nation’s fear that a streak of wild radicalism was sweeping the country, and he crushed the Democrats in 1968 on a theme aimed at the DNC riots: “Law and Order.”
Many protests aren’t convincing because they embellish their message. Take a look at the placards from the anti-war protests this January in Washington: “Impeach Bush!” and “Drive out the Bush Regime!” As if asking for the White House to evacuate in the middle of January 2007 wasn’t dumb enough (or at least one year early) the organizers had Jane Fonda–infamously pictured in Vietnam on the enemy’s anti-aircraft gun—speak to the marchers. Marching against war in D.C. with Jane Fonda is like marching against gay rights in San Francisco with Sen. Larry Craig. You might as well hold up a banner saying, “We do not expect the other side to take us seriously, whatsoever!”
Well, I do want to be taken seriously. That’s why I write letters to the editor of local newspapers and political columns for campus publications. If I marched in Chicago against the war, my placard would probably say something like, “1-2-3-4: I would love to end this war; 5-6-7-8: But we can’t just evacuate.” I know it sucks, and it’s not radical, and it lacks rhythm, but it’s what I believe.
Growing up in the 1990s and coming of age in the post-Sept. 11 world, I’ve grown up in a time of both irrational exuberance and rational inexuberance. An upbringing like that gives you thick skin. I’ve seen one president lie outright about his private life and another flub the facts with far more important issues. I don’t trust our leaders or what I’m told is “intelligence,” and I watch The Daily Show because it’s a fake news show with mostly real information, and not the other way around. I am a part of a generation of cautious optimism, and cautiously optimistic people don’t always feel compelled to shout rhyming saws in downtown Chicago.
I don’t think I’m alone in my quiet protest. Our generation’s volume is indeed softer, because we don’t stomp around public spaces. But it’s louder, too, because in cyberspace we have found a global public square. I’m not convinced that the Internet is the most effective means of producing change, but it is the most efficient and universal means of communication. It’s been central to online campaigns like Greenpeace and Darfur relief efforts. And it’s better than stopping traffic in New York City for two hours and pissing off a million commuters you supposedly hope to persuade.
My generation is not the Protest Generation. Unfortunately for my parents and Thomas Friedman, neither is theirs. Forty years ago, a group of sincere, idealistic young Americans took to the streets to advocate for, among other things, better health care and an end to senseless war. Today, that generation is ruling the country from corner offices and Washington buildings. But the rest of the nation still clamors for better health care and an end to senseless war. If you ask me, the country’s problem isn’t that the twentysomethings aren’t asking the hard questions. The problem is that the men and women in the corner offices don’t remember they ever did.
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Find your candidate here? Or you can return home.
Fantastic!
LR
November 30, 2007 at 6:07 am
Well argued. However, the Nixon archives demonstrate that Vietnam protestors had a notable effect on his policies. I agree that our parents have deflected the blame onto us, but that doesn’t give our generation an excuse to go on blogging about how it is really their fault. There is nothing wrong about making noise — it is only senseless noise that we must avoid. Let’s be the generation that finds a smarter, not a quieter, way to protest.
Ben Armstrong
November 30, 2007 at 11:15 am
Wonderfully and persuasively argued. I would like to add to your point about the internet that the voice of our generation, when taken in perspective, is deafening- we are perhaps the most politically aware to date thanks to the information age (and the perversion of politics into entertainment). It is that the older generations, for the most part, are deaf to our clamoring, because it exists on a plane which they have yet to penetrate or understand: the internet.
These points were nearly picked up by the political world, but have since largely fallen away. Read The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything(http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Will-Not-Televised-Everything/dp/0060761555)
for a more complete illustration of where we were, and consider for yourselves where we are now.
Ben R
December 1, 2007 at 12:26 pm
A well-argued and solid piece, Derek. But you make a point that I feel is fundamentally irresponsible.
You have the good fortune to be living in a place and time where it’s hardly necessary to leave your computer chair for any reason, let alone to register political dissent. Your country is embroiled in a war in which the domestic death toll is merely in the low thousands, the economy is humming along pleasantly, and the trash gets picked up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at six.
But I invite you to imagine that things are a just a little bit different. It’s your number getting called, and you’re up next to go to Kontum, or alternatively, Sadr City. That’s your neighbor or uncle coming back from the Tet Offensive, or alternatively, the Troop Surge, in a flag-draped coffin. Is signing an online petition gonna cut it? These possibilities are not so far-fetched.
This war and the attendant atrocities of rabid neoliberalism have been very effectively cleaned up for public consumption. But in this world, which you would have us remember is getting smaller every day, there are still massive amounts of chaos and brutality taking place daily. Our warped sense of perspective may make it hard to believe, but in some parts of the world men and women are currently giving their lives–giving their lives–for the ability to “stomp around in public spaces,” as you put it (Burma, anyone?).
My point is that, yes, it’s marvelous that we now have the ability to effect some sort of political change–vague though I feel it to be–without putting our bodies or our vocal cords at any sort of risk. Yes, we are living in a time when, for some, the absurdest extremes of comfort have come to pass, in all spheres of life, political and otherwise. But.
If our generation forgets how to physically manifest our anger and discontent, we will have busted a long and powerful chain of tradition, stretching farther back than your Martin Luther King, indeed back to John Brown, Daniel Shays, Nat Turner, Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. If this chain is actually broken, I’m not sure what would result; all I know is, I hope that this Web Brigade isn’t the best we have to offer if shit goes south.
James Chapin
December 2, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Good freaking job!
Susannah
December 3, 2007 at 7:38 pm
well said. you might also be interested in this blog: http://campusprogress.org/opinions/2219/the-kids-are-alright
Janessa
December 4, 2007 at 10:36 am
It’s more than physical protest – we lack physical interaction and human contact in general. The more time we spend in front of the computer screen, the less with other people. The people who are “different” from you (whether it’s Muslims, queer folk or Republicans) are going to keep seeming way scary to you until you talk to them.
Bodies in a room together have infinite possibilities. Our communication revolution won’t happen on the web – it will be with our bodies: sitting together, talking, listening, REALLY listening, and trying to understand.
Ashley Keyser
December 6, 2007 at 4:55 pm
The generation of the sixties, my mother’s generation, did make a difference: without them we would still be living on the principles of the fifties. You can’t tell me that talking and communication via the internet will ever get us as far as climbing on a freedom ride to Alabama, sitting at an all-white lunch counter, or boycotting buses. Because no matter how much we type, the powers that be can ignore it. Only when we make our physical presence known will they really begin to listen. It wasn’t just the college protesters with the signs that made a difference during the Vietnam war, it was the soldiers themselves, draftees, founding underground protest newspapers in their barracks, refusing to fight, in extreme cases killing their officers. This is a story that we don’t see because the military and government suppressed it.
What I see today is not a new and different kind of commitment. I see people shopping, not boycotting. During the sixties young people were willing to change their lives, their behavior, the food they ate, for a cause. And they made a difference, as in the California Grape Boycott. Today we do not change our lives, we make excuses, saying that we can do just as much good in front of our computer screens, without putting down our bag of Doritos.
The information is out there, we get it all the time. Many people know who Peter Singer is, are familiar with his writing, and yet how many of them actually regularly urge their families to donate any substantial amount of money (I know you have it, Northwestern students) to save lives? We know that we need to do something now to stop climate change, and yet what are we doing to make our government sign the Kyoto Protocol? Why? I think that our generation may be afflicted by procrastination. We think to ourselves, “when I graduate from college, when I have money, power, influence, then I’ll make a difference.” Guess what? After living our whole lives without doing anything, it will be an extremely hard pattern to break. Start now, live an entire life that you can look back on and say to yourself, “I was a truly Great person.” It’s the only shot you’ve got, so make it good.
Elias Alexander
December 7, 2007 at 3:43 pm
I think this is an amazing piece. I am actually writing an essay on this topic now and googled “new apathetic generation” and yours was the first hit. Your article has exactly the point I am trying to get across. It’s not that we don’t care, we just care differently. And I think a barrier is that the older generation does not communicate effectively enough with us to know that we care, and that frustrates us (at least it does me). I personally know no one who does not care and we have heated debates and discussions, but they are among ourselves. When our elders, mostly teachers, join in, they don’t discuss, they tell. We have access to information and arguments but it does not seem that they know that. We are looked down upon as not caring, but they don’t see, they just look. Growing communications between the generation would lead to a realization that we do care, it’s just different.
Thank you for writing this.
Madeleine
September 22, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Derek, I was interested to read your article, simply because I am one of those people who made up the protest generation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And yes, I did stomp around in squares and the like. And I did have the idea that the present generation doesn’t care like we did – I’ve got a lot of friends aged between 20 and 30. But now I’ve read your piece and I’m glad to know you do care. By the way, I’ve not become conservative, conventional and boring in my old age – I’m just as much of a red rebel as I used to be, totally unmaterialistic and living a very simple life. What I do still feel is that your generation are extremely materialistic. I feel you don’t appreciate how lucky you are to have three square meals a day, a comfortable home with nice furniture, or never having to go to bed at night wondering whether you’ll wake up alive the next morning. Let alone the fact that you seem to take for granted luxury items like cars, computers and mobile phones. Materialism and materialist possessions don’t give people a sense of contentment – they just make them want more and more. And the more they have, the more miserable they are. True!
Maria
November 3, 2008 at 4:59 am
Excellent article. One year later, our generation is on the verge of making the biggest statement possible in support of your thesis here.
Sajid
November 3, 2008 at 3:18 pm