Acceleration of generational change

If I had the time I would write this book, or maybe the book already exists (?); nevertheless, I would write a book about the generations that have really mattered in human history.... And speculate about the generations that will matter in the future....

Today, we classify generations based on the pace of technological change. The truth is, for over 90% of human history, technological change hasn't been a factor; technology didn't changed much from one generation to the next, hence generations didn't matter so much. One generation was hardly distinguishable from the last.

Historians might take exception with my claim: with migration, exploration, conquest, and mixing of peoples, religions and cultures, one generation of people in a particular place could be dramatically different than another. But such historical changes mostly revolved around culture. Culture is important but deeper analysis is called for....

It would be interesting to trace an exact date when generations started to become markedly different. Up until about 150 or 120 years ago, there were long gaps between significant changes. Today, we name each new generation; a reason why is that we take it for granted that each new generation will look at the world differently, and, essentially, be smarter than us.  The driver of change is technological innovation that makes the world smaller; technology that changes our ideas of what it means to be human, and what it means to be members of a planetary race....

In ancient history we talk of ages, not generations, because historical records aren't so precise; and because changes spread slowly and locally because of distance and poor communications.

Granted, even today change doesn't spread uniformly.  The Internet still has poor penetration in Africa, for instance.  Yet in the not-too-distant future, we can anticipate that everyone will have access to all of the latest knowledge via the Internet.  Air travel, phones and television already facilitate cultural mixing on an unprecedented scale.

What will be the clear markers of future generations?  Space colonization?  Unlocking the secrets of human immortality? Climate change catastrophe?  Roboticization of most human work?  The common integration of tech hardware and software with human bodies, i.e. androids?  Some breakthrough discovery in physics that unites relativity and quantum physics. i.e. a Unified Field Theory?  A new economic system that supplants capitalism?  The decline of religious practice?  Massive migration from the developed to the developing world?  Widespread negative birthrates (which are already happening in Europe)?  Or a combination of all these factors and other things?

The crazy thing is, today we can almost anticipate what those changes will be. We know that most of the above-mentioned drivers of change will happen, or are happening; their advent is only a matter of time.

And perhaps our current anticipation of future change is a generational marker in an of itself. Perhaps historians in the future will look back and say, in the 21st century, humans for the first time were able to predict accurately futures that hadn't happened yet.  Perhaps that will be a great marker in human time.  We take our forward-looking for granted, but relatively it is a very, very recent phenomenon. These are the first generations looking forward and backward at the same time, but for the first time perhaps in human history, more focused on the future. Today we expect the world to be turned upside-down. We are the first generations to anticipate our own obsolescence.

Ah, the 'green' old days?

Very nice and point taken: older Americans didn't produce as much garbage as we do today; they re-used glass and paper bags, sometimes; and they washed and re-used cloth diapers... until 1970 when Pampers became a national brand.

Still, what this guy -- I guess technically not a Baby Boomer if he hit retirement age 5 years ago -- is saying is not so much untrue, as only part of the truth, which is that the Greatest Generation (1901-24), Silent Generation (1925-45), and then Baby Boomers (1946-64) each in their turn developed and promoted our modern American throw-away consumer culture.

They were not standing apart from it all these years, in their moral superiority, reminiscing about the good ole' days. They enthusiastically created this mess -- and profited nicely from it -- leaving the consequences (climate change; overflowing landfills; post-industrial ghost towns and urban blight; peak oil, etc.) to us "slackers" from Gens X and Y to handle.

I don't watch Mad Men, but I gather it's about Madison Avenue and the dawn of the ad age in the 1960s, when companies started selling us a lot of stuff we didn't necessarily need with catchy jingles; when convenience, especially around the house, was the operative word. These firms were staffed by the Greatest and Silent Generations. They pushed this way of life on us. So they can't shirk moral responsibility in their old age.

Commentary: The 'green' old days

By Bill Morem

March 10, 2012 | San Luis Obispo Tribune

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/10/140832/commentary-the-green-old-days.html#storylink=cpy

Facebook's IPO, income, and users' privacy

Although Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said two years ago that privacy is obsolete among the younger generations, in fact, more and more Facebook users are opting to share less and less of their personal info. Reported HuffPost:

"Researchers at Polytechnic Institute of New York University tracked the privacy settings of 1.4 million Facebook profiles belonging to New Yorkers over a 15-month period between March 2010 and June 2011. They found a 'dramatic decrease in the amount of information Facebook users reveal about themselves to the general public' and the authors concluded that the users became 'dramatically more private' during the period, according to their report.

"Over the same period, users stepped up the frequency with which they hid personal details in their public profiles, which are visible to anyone on Facebook, a friend or otherwise. To measure this, the researchers tracked nine characteristics often included on public profiles -- 'friend lists, age, high-school name and graduation year, network, relationship, gender, interested in, hometown and current city' -- and monitored whether members shared fewer details over time."

Maybe younger folks are starting to catch on -- like their bosses and potential bosses already have -- that making your life an open book on the internet may not be such a swell idea.

Meanwhile, saying that "we must reject the conclusion that privacy is an outmoded value," and that privacy has been "at the heart of our democracy from its inception," President Obama released a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights" for the new global digital economy.

Gee, let's cross our fingers and really hope FB users' privacy issues and Obama's new regulations won't hurt Facebook's IPO, heh-heh-heh.

BTW, if you accept Facebook's figures, then in 2011 they earned about $4.40 in revenue per user. For comparison, let's look at Tristan Louis's figures for other internet/social networking companies:

*Average revenue per user:

Pandora: $ 0.54

LinkedIn: $ 1.79

GroupOn: $ 8.60

Living Social: $ 9.41

Zynga: $ 2.57

Facebook: $4.39

*Granted, since these firms have different business models, a better measure would be net profit per user -- see below. Notwithstanding, Louis's figures from 5 top social networking firms indicate that $4 average revenue per user is a good expectation, and that is supported by other analyses.

Per-user valuation at IPO:

Pandora: $ 50.98

LinkedIn: $ 86.67

GroupOn: $ 271.08

Living Social: ?

Zynga: $ 75.43

*Facebook: $11.83

*Assuming FB can raise $10 billion in an IPO; they said they hope to raise at least $5 billion.

For the above firms, I compiled these annual profit figures for 2011:

Net profit per user:

*Pandora: $ 5.10

**LinkedIn: $ 0.68

***GroupOn: -$ 1.29

****Living Social: ?

*****Zynga: -$ 1.68

Facebook: $ 1.20

*Pandora has had only 1 reported public quarter since its IPO. This is based on Q4 2011.

** LinkedIn reports only its annual EBITDA, not net profit.

***GroupOn has had only 1 reported public quarter since its IPO.

****Living Social is privately held and has delayed its IPO, but is expected to go public eventually.

*****Zynga went public in Dec. 2011; its annual net profit and latest user figures were used here.

Pretty slim pickin's in the brave new world of internet social networks. It's a definitely a volume game.

Here you can see another analysis of revenue per unique user among internet firms:

'Older generations have eaten younger ones'

"In many countries the young are being crushed by a gerontocracy of older workers who appear determined to cling to the better jobs as long as possible and then, when they do retire, demand impossibly rich private and public pensions that the younger generation will be forced to shoulder."

"The older generations have eaten the future of the younger ones," former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said.

You Boomers who are in good health and making good money want to keep working until you're 80, and then collect every dime you're entitled to under Social Security.
Whereas we in Gens X and Y will have to work till we're 80 (or dead) just to survive.

But here's a solution, which I have long advocated, as opposed to the false solutions of more same-old technical schools or even more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates in the U.S.: apprenticeships, which by definition match skills training to the needs of markets:

"These days there's a newfound appreciation for an ancient work arrangement, the apprenticeship, because it greases the transition from learning to doing. Germany and Austria experienced milder youth unemployment in the global downturn partly because of blue-collar apprenticeship programs."

If you Boomers would teach some youngins what you know, you could do the country some good, instead of hoarding all the jobs while demanding Social Security and Medicare payouts!


The Youth Unemployment Bomb
From Cairo to London to Brooklyn, too many young people are jobless and disaffected. Inside the global effort to put the next generation to work
By Peter Coy
February 2, 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek

URL: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/07_52/b4064058743638.htm

Jon Stewart's rally bad for America, liberal activism

Just in case some of you think I take my marching orders from Jon Stewart, here are two very strong criticisms of his silly Rally to Restore Sanity yesterday.

First, mean-spirited, angry liberal journalist Mark Ames, who attended the rally for a short while before he had to bail, argued that the rally is emblematic of his generation's prime directives to 1) never risk looking stupid, no matter what is at stake, and 2) always preserve one's ironic detachment from events, even from oneself. That kind of cool pose is great and everything at parties, but not when the general welfare of the nation is at stake. Concluded Ames:

You see, this is why so many cool Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers were so jazzed up about going to the Stewart rally – by definition, they were guaranteed not to look stupid by going to it, because it's not really a rally. They're not putting anything on the line. They're just going to chant the equivalent of that annoying Saturday Night Live Update skit 'Really?' No generation ever looked so cool so late in their lives as my generation. We did it! We achieved our dream! We don't look as stupid as the hippies did when they were in their 40s! Woo-hoo! We still mock ourselves and we're still self-aware, but best of all, we don't look stupid by devoting ourselves to ideas or movements that other people might one day laugh at. We won! We won the least-stupid-looking-generation competition! Let's gather together in an ironic, self-aware way, and celebrate how we're not really rallying or laying anything on the line–not even now, not even when the whole fucking country is collapsing. What's our prize, Don?
Meanwhile, behind Door Number 1, the country is in two losing wars and the worst economic crisis in 80 years, behind Door Number 2, over 40 million Americans are on fucking food stamps, behind Door Number 3, millions are being land-transfered out of their property like landless peasants in a banana republic–yeah, it's bad, whatever dude, it's always been bad, nothing ever changes much, don't have a cow, deal with it….

Second, founder of the anti-war group CODEPINK, Medea Benjamin, made a similar although more focused criticism prior to the event, saying Stewart's "slacktivism" celebrates those people who are too "sane" to rally against insane wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other unjust government policies. She also noted how Stewart's Daily Show spent two hours taping her, along with an anarchist and a teabagger, lumping them all together as protesting nutjobs. As if any loud and angry protest by definition is crazy. She concluded:

So let's celebrate the people who walk the talk. Slacktivism did not end slavery, activism did. Slacktivism did not get women our rights. Activism did. Slacktivism won't end war or global warming. But activism just might.

I've said it before: my generation's children and grandchildren are not going to be proud of us because we were so cool and avoided saying stupid things; they're going to blame us for sitting on the sidelines in ironical detachment while our country went to shit. If we don't stand up and stand for something -- and that something should be liberal-progressive ideals which have saved us in the past and can do so again -- then we are irrelevant.

That said, Jon Stewart is funny. That's his job. It's not his job to organize and lead us. We are not like those atomized zombies of the Right looking for a TV preacher like Glenn Beck to tell us where to gather and what to say and do.

Courtney Martin: News makes me sad. - OMG, ME 2

Some people watch Friends; I read Courtney Martin. She's like, you know, so a voice for my generation, or whatever.

Part of me knows her whole sincere liberal chick schtick is keck, but part of me knows she's on to something. In any case, I give her credit for trying to articulate (in her own sighing, post-adolescent way) a feeling that a lot of younger folks have nowadays, but don't know how to act on.


All the News That's Fit to Depress
By Courtney E. Martin

December 3, 2007 | Prospect.org

It is Saturday. I am at a coffee shop in Brooklyn with my boyfriend and one of our best friends -- nice guys, guys who care deeply about what is going on in the world beyond fantasy football, music, and their motley crew of friends. We're drinking coffee, eating bagels, and reading my New York Times.

I tend to stick to a quick perusal of the Times online, in addition to a half dozen blogs and online news sites (like this one) during the week, but on the weekends I like to hold the paper in my hands, let my fingertips get blackened, really immerse myself in what's been happening. When I was just out of college and had very little money, I used to wait until late Sunday evening and then scour my neighborhood for discarded papers. When I finally started making money from my writing, one of my first "indulgences" was a weekend subscription to The New York Times. (So fancy, I know.)

Reading it each weekend has become more than an attempt to stay informed. It has become an exercise in witnessing, an act of pure will. Some weekends it feels like a masochistic, last-ditch effort to keep myself from going numb. Some weekends, I can hardly read the headlines without feeling myself being pulled into a morass of 21st century existential pain over the challenges of living aware in a globalized world with so much violence, soulless bureaucracy, and disappointing leadership.

This weekend is no different. As the boys and I flip through the paper, we find the following headlines:

Market Bomb Shatters Lull for Baghdad

Bombs in Northern India Kill 13 Near Courthouses

Barely Getting By, Too Proud to Seek Help and Facing a Cold Maine Winter.

After awhile we look up and get engrossed in a conversation that will last long after our coffee has gone cold -- what, in God's name, are we supposed to do with this information? What are we -- three well-educated, big-hearted, human beings -- supposed to do when we get up from these tables and discard this paper, knowing about the dead people and dreams in Iraq, the injured in India, the starving and old in Maine?

There is so much talk in schools, think tanks, even on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, about how pathetically uninformed the American public is about world affairs. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports that "a solid majority of the public (61 percent) continues to track international news only when major developments occur, while far fewer (37 percent) are consistently engaged by international news coverage."

But what about those of us trying to keep our ears, eyes, and hearts open? There is so little public dialogue about what an empathetic person is supposed to do with the information they gather, about what an emotional experience it can be to just read the morning's paper or peruse your favorite Web sites.

It's as if we have declared knowing a virtue in itself, without recognizing what a great and potentially painful responsibility knowing is. Knowing is supposed to lead to action. That's what keeps compassion from rotting into hopelessness -- being empowered to do something about the feelings you are experiencing. But in our current climate, the news serves to depress us instead of galvanize us. Staying informed has become -- for so many of us -- a moral obligation that feels like hell.

It seems to be that we haven't figured out systems -- educational, governmental, non-governmental -- for actualizing the inevitable outrage, sadness, and empathy that we feel as a direct result of contemporary world news. Some blogs have created associations between news and action -- links to online petitions or nonprofit organizations directly after a post. But traditionally, journalists are taught to see reportage as their sole role. We provide you with the facts, you figure out what to do about them. There are a few exceptions; newspapers and magazines certainly encourage letters to the editor. And when I write for the Christian Science Monitor, for example, the editors always push me to come up with a solution-oriented ending to my op-eds. But most of these efforts -- with the exception, perhaps, of the great outpouring of relief that followed the tsunami in Indonesia (30 percent of American households gave, according to Bill Clinton's new book, Giving) or Hurricane Katrina -- feel more like satiation for the consumer as opposed to a real, fundamental opportunity to make change.

And it's taking a powerful psychic toll. I've heard otherwise politically active people say -- more often than I can count -- "I can't handle keeping up with the news these days. It's just too depressing." Surely, some of those who aren't informed are actually psychically protecting themselves. The Pew Center also found that 42 percent of those with a moderate to low interest in international news report avoiding it because there is "too much war/violence" and 51 percent avoid the news because "nothing ever changes."

I also can't help but wonder if the average liberal American's love for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert isn't a direct result of the emotional relief that comes from being told: "This is the news. Now laugh at it." The action becomes the laugh. The instinct to torture yourself over how to respond to the situation in Sudan is displaced by a chuckle at how badly other people -- namely our eternally comic president -- are responding.

I enjoy those shows too, but it's not enough. We can't settle for laughing our outrage away when there is so much violence in the world -- some of which we are directly responsible for. We also can't keep shoving the lesson of informed citizenship down good people's throats -- Do your duty! Stay informed! -- if we aren't going to create new ways of responding to all that information. It's actually a destructive recommendation in many ways -- pushing people to grow accustomed to disaster, disconnected, numb, and ethically dumbfounded. At the very least, it's breaking our hearts.

It's certainly breaking mine, and I even have the great fortune of being able to write in response to some of the deep sadness I feel over the state of the world. This column, in part, is my attempt to process those feelings so I can continue to have them. Without writing, I grow desperate -- I imagine getting on a plane to Darfur with no thought of how I might actually be useful there, or quitting writing and going to medical school even though I've never wanted to be a doctor. I know these are haphazard, ineffective thoughts on how to respond to the world's problems, but I can't help it. I just need to stop feeling, stop thinking, and start doing.

Too many of us are experiencing the rotting sensation of so many thoughts with no cathartic action. My friends around the coffee shop table express it as an acute and ever-present pain. In fact, we're all hung over from the night before. [Ross, Phoebe, Joey, et al were never hung over at the coffee shop, they just hung out! -- J ] That too, we decide, has something to do with this unsolvable angst; there are plenty of ways that people try to numb themselves so they don't have to process the same powerless feelings. It's as if we are well-educated, empathic Frankensteins, created by our own country's privilege and civic dogma, but all we feel is monstrously ineffective.

This has to change. There must be some method whereby we can become informed and inspired to action. Maybe the answer lies in retraining journalists to go one step beyond reporting. Get the story, and also seek information about how a reader might constructively respond to it. This, of course, would require increased support for the work of investigative journalists. It would also require strategic partnerships between the professional media and nonprofit worlds, links that already exist between journalism and international affairs schools like those at Columbia University.

Maybe the answer lies in citizen journalists -- folks who often abandon the old-school idea of objectivity and tackle local issues with a verve for making change, not just reporting on it. This trend is already on the rise, and while it makes traditional journalists wince, maybe it could actually serve to empower some of the country's currently disenchanted readers.

Maybe the answer lies in the readers themselves. Sometimes I can't help but feel like we are on the verge of some new paradigm shift with regard to attention and connection. As technology changes and the world becomes smaller, isn't it inevitable that we will develop new emotional and cognitive ways of processing it all? Our survival depends on our capacity to live consciously and interdependently. Perhaps this ache is our hearts playing catch-up to globalization.

I'm not too cynical yet to believe that this impotence is a natural part of being human. We're too complex and connected and creative. Maybe it's the strong coffee and the good conversation with friends I love, but I just know that there's got to be a better way.

[Cue music: "I'll be there for youuuuuu, when the rain starts to faaaall ...." - J]

Gens X-Y-Z are in trouble

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.