I'm starting to like Courtney Martin's whole sincere "activist chick" shtick in spite of myself. She's written a few columns lately that are resolving into a theme: What the hell is wrong with us young people today? With all the knowledge and material advantages we enjoy, why can't we translate that into real change which satisfies us?
In the article below she makes an excellent, excellent point, and with real feeling – but it's a point that was already made more thoughtfully, and with a surprising amount of apprehension, by conservative pundit David Brooks in his 2001 article in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Organization Kid."
Brooks quotes authors Neil Howe and William Strauss to sum up Generation Y's attitude: "'They're optimists ... They're cooperative team players ... They accept authority ... They're rule followers.' The authors paint a picture of incredibly wholesome youths who will correct the narcissism and nihilism of their Boomer parents."
In other words, irony of ironies, the hippy generation completely sold out its youth and bred the biggest bunch of run-with-the-herd, do-what-da-Man-say conformists ever produced by a free nation. It's as if the Boomers all came to the same realization at once: "Oh, shit! Taking on The Man won't pay for two cars, a McMansion, and four years at an Ivy for my 2.3 kids!"
Sound crazy? Brooks quotes Howe and Strauss further: "Ironically, where young Boomers once turned to drugs to prompt impulses and think outside the box, today they turn to drugs to suppress their kids' impulses and keep their behavior inside the box ... Nowadays, Dennis the Menace would be on Ritalin, Charlie Brown on Prozac."
And now I'll quote Brooks at length, because this is really spot-on [emphasis mine]:
"Today's ramped-up parental authority rests on three pillars: science, safety, and achievement. What we ambitious parents know about the human brain tells us that children need to be placed in stimulating and productive environments if they are going to reach their full potential. What we know about the world tells us that it is a dangerous place: there are pesticides on our fruit, cigarettes in the school yards, rocks near the bike paths, kidnappers in the woods. Children need to be protected. And finally, what we know about life is that sorting by merit begins at birth and never ends. Books about what to expect in the first year lay out achievement markers starting in the first month, and from then on childhood is one long progression of measurements, from nursery school admissions to SATs. Parents need to be coaching at their child's side.
"Imagine being a product of this regimen—one of the kids who thrived in it, the sort who winds up at elite schools. All your life you have been pleasing your elders, performing and enjoying the hundreds of enrichment tasks that dominated your early years. You are a mentor magnet. You spent your formative years excelling in school, sports, and extracurricular activities. And you have been rewarded with a place at a wonderful university filled with smart, successful, and cheerful people like yourself. Wouldn't you be just like the students I found walking around Princeton?
"[…]
"The world they live in seems fundamentally just. If you work hard, behave pleasantly, explore your interests, volunteer your time, obey the codes of political correctness, and take the right pills to balance your brain chemistry, you will be rewarded with a wonderful ascent in the social hierarchy. You will get into Princeton and have all sorts of genuinely interesting experiences open to you. You will make a lot of money—but more important, you will be able to improve yourself. You will be a good friend and parent. You will be caring and conscientious. You will learn to value the really important things in life. There is a fundamental order to the universe, and it works. If you play by its rules and defer to its requirements, you will lead a pretty fantastic life."
The main reason "organization kids" worry Brooks is that he considers them moral relativists, i.e. they believe they can do pretty much whatever they want as long as nobody gets hurt. (Not that they have much time for self-destructive behavior or experimentation, what with all their extra-curriculars.)
But as Ms. Martin notes, there's a tragic side to all this straightening up and flying right among today's youth: They don't strive for anything nobler or greater than their own self-advancement. And this, I'm here to tell you, is their parents' fault. It's their teachers' fault. Yes, it's a whole generation's fault. Because you ex-hippies (or hippy haters, as the case may be) made sure to convince your children that the sixties counter-culture was fundamentally impractical, destined to be temporary, and, although silly, nevertheless managed to tie up any remaining legal and social loose ends of American history. Their work was finished and done, forever and ever, Amen.
So, you Baby Boomers, you ex-hippies, next time you ask what's wrong with these kids today, why they seem so apathetic, why they don't take more interest in politics or get more involved, know the answer is: You. You did this. You created us. You made us believe that all the wrongs had been righted, all the battles had been fought, that protest was pointless ("Protest against what?") and resistance was futile ("Resist against us, your parents? Come on, we're cool!"). You taught us that the world's remaining ills could be solved by volunteering one weekend a month, composing a 500-word essay, or making a charitable donation. You taught us that all there is to life is making money, getting married, and raising kids.
Granted, that's not such a terrible ideal. As Brooks notes: "These young people are wonderful to be around. If they are indeed running the country in a few decades, we'll be in fine shape. It will be a good country, though maybe not a great one."
Brooks recognizes the fundamental conservatism that's been successfully bred into today's young elite – and he finds it very pleasant. He just wishes wistfully, greedily, that Gen Y could be successful corporate automatons yet still retain the brash masculine nobility and "vale of tears" morality of their grandparents and great-parents.
Uh-uh, sorry, it don't work that way. You can't raise perfectly well-adjusted, higher-achieving sheep who are also contrarian moral thinkers and daredevil risk-takers.
Baby Boomers, behold your creation.
Finally, a message for my fellow Gen X'ers or Gen Y'ers or whatever the marketing exec's are calling us nowadays: Your in-the-know irony and sarcasm – heavy-laden with pop-culture references and saturated with consumer-culture tastes and fashions – is a dead giveaway of your impotence. Stop trying to be so goddamn clever and care about something, why don't you? That goes for me, too!
Our Baby Boomer parents, and the media which they own, have inculcated in us the belief that passion and outrage are inevitably regrettable emotions which interfere with our ability to play well with others. Since most hippies were – let's face it – just the conformists of their day trying to look cool, have fun, and get laid like the youth of every generation, they invariably cringe with embarrassment at their former angry, smelly, hirsute selves who are now out of fashion – or more precisely, have become fashion. (Exhibit A: Bell-bottom jeans and peasant blouses at The Gap. I rest my case.)
But even those disavowed hippies are better than us. At least they had an identity to disavow. What do we have? We have "retro" and trends categorized and sold to us by the decade. (Question: Did young people in the 1907 think it was ironic & cool to dress like people in 1877?) We have no thought or trend to call our own. Even environmentalism and the "green movement" are a Boomer invention: just a bunch of ex-hippy professors who were the first to ponder, scientifically, what would befall mankind if we continued to turn the earth inside out and cover it in shit. Even punk and hip-hop ("our" music) are just mainstream commercializations of 1970s New York culture invented by fringe Boomers. Debbie Harry and Grand Master Flash are old enough to be your parents!
I guess all I'm saying is, let's stop worrying about looking so smart, ironic, and cool, and start worrying about our legacy. We haven't done much so far. What are we going to leave behind except a bunch of ridiculous second-hand clothes and CDs? More important, what are our kids going to blame us for? (Maybe they'll just skip right over us and blame our parents and grand-parents, because we'll appear to be such historical nobodies and go-alongs by comparison. One can hope, right?) If anything, they're going to blame us for not being loud, unctuous, and obnoxious enough. There's a lot of bad shit going down right now, and it's easy to ignore it and concentrate on family and career, just like our parents want us to. But don't.
We can't count on the younger generation to bail us out either, because they're even worse kowtowers and suck-ups than we are. They eat and breathe external approval. They can't begin to conceive of an activity that hasn't first been sanctioned by some authority figure.
Hopefully it's not too late for us twenty- and thirty-somethings to discover "pointless" teenage rebellion.
The Problem With Youth Activism
The institutionalization of activism on college campuses is a key culprit in the absence of visible youth movements in this country.
Courtney E. Martin
November 19, 2007 | Prospect.org
"Do you think this is the right color ribbon?" asked a petite brunette, her hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail, her college sweatshirt engulfing her tiny frame. "And do you think these are the right length of sections I'm cutting? I don't want it to be all funky when we pin them on."
"Mmm ... I'm not sure," said the guy next to her, sucking on a lollipop, his football-player physique totally evident in his tight band T-shirt.
"Looks good to me," his roommate said without even glancing over at the ribbon or the girl.
Meet the college anti-war movement.
I just got back from a two-week campus speaking tour during which I had the privilege of hanging out in a women's center at a Catholic college, eating bad Mexican food with Mennonite feminists, and chatting with aspiring writers and activists at a college in which half the students are the first in their families to experience higher education. I heard the stories of transgender youth in Kansas City, jocks with food addictions in Jacksonville, and student organizers who are too overwhelmed to address all the world's problems in Connecticut.
When my plane finally landed with a resounding bump at LaGuardia, I felt totally inspired by the earnest enthusiasm that beamed out of almost every student I encountered -- and also terrified that the university system is sucking the life out of them. At the risk of biting the hand that feeds me (I am usually paid to speak, in part, by student organizations and women's centers), I have to attest that the institutionalization of activism on college campuses seems to be a key culprit in the absence of visible youth movements in this country.
The scene above illustrates just the kind of vibe you can find at an anti-war or nonviolence club on college campuses any day of the week. It is sweetly collaborative, mainly focused on raising awareness among students, very keyed in to particular dates (Love Your Body Day, Earth Day, Black History Month), and most of all, safe. This is not terribly surprising considering that these clubs are sanctioned and funded (sometimes with upward of thousands of dollars a year) by the school administration through a formal application process. They are structured to legitimize but also to domesticate student passions and actions from the start.
And students do have passions, contrary to what some hippies-turned-well-paid-pundits argue. A survey conducted just this year by the National Association of Campus Activities (NACA) found that 98 percent of students at their annual meeting saw the war in Iraq as one of the issues most important to them. Erin Wilson, the director of communication for NACA, reports that student involvement in campus activities is increasing all the time and adds that among their 1,040 member schools, a yearly total of $150 million is spent on campus programming.
As great as it might seem that colleges and universities are supporting student causes, I actually believe that it has tamed the critical energy necessary to be young, outraged, and active. When you're being funded by a team of white-haired academics in suits, taking real risks -- acts of civil disobedience like sit-ins, hunger strikes, boycotts -- don't seem like such a smart idea. Students rightly wonder whether they will "ruin it" for the next class if they cross the line and lose the school leadership's support. Plus, it's so much easier to just eat the free pizza and cut the three-inch ribbons than to mastermind a rebellious and potentially dangerous student uprising.
The academy, in general, encourages specialization, intellectualization, civility -- not exactly the key ingredients for effective social action. Students are surrounded by professors reminiscing about the glory days of youth activism, when groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party really ignited social change. But the professors don't seem to make the connection that none of these were school-sanctioned organizations.
Today's youth activism is largely enacted within the gated fortresses of higher learning. Students are overwhelmingly and often motivated by applying to law school or resumé-building. (How do you think they got into these undergraduate institutions in the first place?) They funnel their outrage into weekly club meetings and awareness campaigns that look good on paper -- activities that convey to future employers and institutions that they are socially involved and aware but not at odds with the system. Students seem to join sanctioned, existing clubs, rather than launch their own radical actions, without much resistance or critical questioning. Perhaps they've been socialized to accept the status quo [Yes! – J], but even more, I believe they simply don't have the time or energy to start innovative revolutions from scratch because they are so busy taking standardized tests and building their resumés with internships and assistantships.
I watched a group of them sort through a brightly colored stack of anti-war quotations to make sure that every single one, literally, bore the stamp of approval from the college activities office so they could hang them around campus without getting in trouble. It made me cringe. This is where their energies were being diverted during the deadliest month yet in the Iraq War.
It made me reflect on my own undergraduate days -- just about five years ago now. I wasn't a rah-rah student government officer, but I certainly did my share of club activities: school newspaper, writing fellows program, resident assistant, volunteering at a Harlem preschool, even the hip-hop club (talk about taming outrage). I remember feeling so busy, so responsible, so important. Now I realize that there was a real cost to that frenzy of school-sanctioned productivity. I rarely thought beyond the borders of folding tables that lined the student activities fairs. I rarely put my body or my future on the line. While I was tutoring fellow students in grammar and composition and making door tags for my residence halls, I missed the escalation of a bogus justification for a messy war in my name.
In one of the largest studies ever conducted of Generation Y, psychology professor Jean M. Twenge found that college students "increasingly believe that their lives are controlled by outside forces" -- called "externality" in the psychology field. Twenge writes, "The average college student in 2002 had more external control beliefs than 80 percent of college students in the early 1960s."
Is it any wonder? We were raised to organize our adolescent lives in pursuit of external approval: church awards, athletic scholarships, and college admissions. More than any generation in history, we've been signed up, roped in, and overscheduled. When we get to college, many of us rush to join clubs in an attempt to recreate this safe feeling of sanctioned activity, of organized energies, of potential approval by authorities. Our innate passions and spontaneous actions have essentially been bred out of us.
The LearningWork Connection, a consulting firm on youth issues, reports that from September 2004 to September 2005, 79 percent of first-year males and 87 percent of first-year females described themselves as "volunteers." They add, however, that "Gen Y is less engaged with civic and political activities than they are with other causes."
Which prompts me to ask, what are "causes," really? The word stinks of bureaucracy and timidity, of the most educated, wanted generation in history sprawled across standard university furniture -- not planning the next revolution, but eating free cookies and voting on whether buttons or ribbons will be less destructive to students' clothing.
I saw the surefire glimmer of pure passion in these students' eyes. I know they are capable of great and ingenious uprisings, a type of protest that is totally 21st century, a trademark Generation Y invention. Viruses in campus administrators' computers with pop-up windows demanding no more expansion into poor, local neighborhoods? Mock draft cards sent home to their parents? A dance party -- 1 million youth strong -- on the Washington lawn? It all seems possible.
They need to stay out of the student center long enough to figure out what their version of outraged activism really is. Small as it may sound, big change would happen if college students today could protect their purest intentions from the pacifying force of free pizza and resumé kudos. Our generation needs to step into our raw power -- the priceless power of being young and mad. We need to stay hungry long enough to get angry.
Courtney E. Martin is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn. She is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (Simon & Schuster's Free Press). You can read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.
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