One of the odd things about blogdom, and the commentariat in general, is the way that people will all seem to latch on to some particular idea at about the same time, despite the lack of any obvious connection between them. I keep having days when I scan through my RSS feeds, and find the same topics coming up again and again.
This week’s emergent theme seems to be “Kids These Days.” It started with this deeply silly complaint about the “whiteness” of indie music by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker, which strikes me as a classic example of a writer straining to find deep cultural meaning in their own aesthetic preferences. Then there’s an Inside Higher Ed piece lamenting the fact that today’s college students get along with their parents, which also includes an in-passing reference to the “whiteness” of indie music. Finally, there’s Kevin Drum who notes a dumb Thomas Friedman column about the complacency of college kids, and a bunch of responses. I think Kevin’s got it about right, but honestly, my reaction to this accumulation of articles is best summed up by a commenter on the Inside Higher Ed article, who wrote:
Oh God, we’re going to have to listen to self-centered drivel from aged hippies now for the next thirty years until they finally all die off.
Amen, brother.
On a more serious level, I think Kevin nails it when he says:
But look: it’s not the 80s, 90s, or 00s that are unique here. What’s unique was a single period of about ten years from the early 60s to the early 70s. The kind of activism we saw from young people during that decade hadn’t been seen for a century before that and probably won’t be seen for a century after it. It was sui generis, and pretending otherwise is silly.
I’ll go a step farther than that, even: I’m not convinced that the late 60’s and early 70’s were really all that.
Back when I was in grad school in DC, my friend Paul and I got to talking about this during one of the previous rounds of “kids these days aren’t like we were in the 60’s.” His parents and mine are both of the Baby Boom generation, but none of them were especially hippie-ish. In the tumultuous years of the late 60’s and early 70’s, when the Baby Boomers were supposed to be marching and protesting and transforming society, my father was teaching in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, and then settling down in Central New York to teach middle school and start a family. Paul’s father was a doctor in the Army, and spent most of that time stationed in Utah, and a less hippieish setting is hard to find.
In the popular imagination, every single person born between 1945 and 1960 was a hippie radical, dodging the draft and fighting oppression. In reality, the largest organized protests I can find any numbers for come in somewhere around a million people, while most of the high-profile marches seem to have been more on the order of 10,000. Even a million people is only half a percent of a population of 200 million (in 1971). Even if you assume that every single person taking part in that protest was between 15 and 29– the Baby Boom cohort in 1971– you’re looking at maybe one person in 50 of that generation who actively participated (guesstimating the 15-29 fraction as 25%, looking at these graphs).
That’s the high-water mark for youth activism, right there. One in 50. Even in the all-important Sixties, with a single issue to coalesce around, and the draft to provide a sense of immediate personal threat, the vast majority of young people pretty much went about the business of being young people, just like the “apathetic” kids these days. They went to college, got jobs, started families, and generally tried to do the best they could for themselves and their families. As people that age always have done, and always will do.
Is this generation substantially worse than the Baby Boomers, in terms of passionate activism for causes that they believe in? There are about 2100 students at Union, where I teach, and that one in 50 fraction would get you about 40 students, which doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. They’re not all passionate about the same cause, but we’ve got at least that many students who are seriously involved with some cause or another.
The difference between today and the 60’s/ 70’s protest era is not the number of young people who are passionate about some political activity, but the attention paid to those people, and the standard to which they’re being held. They’re being compared not to any real level of activism, but rather to an imagined Golden Age of protest that’s remembered with advantages by people who, in all likelihood, weren’t even there.