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.
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There are two differences between then and now: the draft and the oppression of black people.
When I was a high school senior in 1967, I was so tired of school that I complained and complained until my father (a WW II vet) said, "Fine, drop out and and I'll take you down to the draft board." That was the choice for young men at that time: school or the Army, education or Vietnam. If we had a draft today, and enough troops in Iraq to do the job, I think you would find a lot more kids being a lot more activist.
And maybe you and Kevin Drum are young enough not to remember when black people couldn't sit at a restaurant with whites, or ride in the front of the bus, or attend the same schools or buy a house in the certain neighborhoods. I am. And the struggle by blacks and whites to end that discrimination was also part of the activisim of those years.
So, yeah, kids are acting different today because two very serious issues that shaped those days no longer exist.
So, please, give me a break.
Way to miss the point. The math doesn't lie. Apparently, all that time being spent tired of being in school was wasted.
What math are you talking about? The guesstimates or "I don't really know how many were active but I bet it wasn't many"? Or was it the math of whatever the national news media happened to cover and I can find rough guesses for? Or was it something else?
Was the point that that period was "sui generis?" I guess that means there are no important problems facing this generation, problems that might warrant some kind of activism. How wonderful for us, and we should all stop complaining. I know I can't think of any problems. Can you?
I did my undergraduate work, 1966-69, at a state university. Although protesters engendered a lot of sympathy from the student body, their numbers were small, popular perception notwithstanding.
I recall a 1968 symposium on marijuana held in a 3000 seat auditorium that was packed with students and faculty members. Approximately twenty people, dressed in hippy garb, (some students, some not,) sat in a block at the front of the auditorium and commented loudly upon the onstage panel discussion. A local television crew covered the symposium and broadcast a feature clip during the evening news. The only audience members shown in the broadcast were members of the hippy contingency. Letters to the editor of the local paper subsequently complained that the university's entire student body consisted of pot smoking hippies: the writers knew this, because they saw it on television.
The math your flippant comment at the end of your first post blew off. Chad's math. The ratio of activists hasn't changed, but priorities and methods have.
He used the numbers available to him. You're relying on your skewed personal memories of involvement.
Jamie, all us ignorant old former hippies have a saying: "The hit dog hollers." I presume from your initial personal attack that you took umbrage at my comments. I also presume that you have no training in a technical field or you would know the difference between math and WAGs.
Upon reflection, I think the idea that the activists of the 1960s or so was limited in scope or different somehow from other periods is mistaken. First, it's not valid to limit it strictly to students. Sure, the student activists got lots of press, but there were plenty of non-students involved in both the anti-war movement and the civil rights movements. And if you think about it, there certainly were other periods during which there was considerable activism. Take, just for example, womens' suffrage, the labor movement, prohibitionists, and anti-slavery movements. All of those were serious social movements during which there was considerable activism, the kind that gets mentioned in the history books. You could argue about the details or the percentages but it doesn't change the importance of the movements. They made a difference in places that mattered. The same is true of the anti-war and civil rights movments.
The main reason for this discussion is the fact that every generation thinks the previous generation doesn't know anything, and the older generation thinks the younger generation is going to haul everything to hell in a handbasket. So, I suggest that you young whippersnappers give us old hippies a break. Soon enough you will be in our place.
Jamie, all us ignorant old former hippies have a saying: "The hit dog hollers." I presume from your initial personal attack that you took umbrage at my comments. I also presume that you have no training in a technical field or you would know the difference between math and WAGs.
I've been in the lab all morning, and am just now getting to check in on things, or else I would've said this earlier: please try to keep things civil.
As for the original comment, I don't disagree with anything you said. The draft was marvelously effective at concentrating the mind, and the civil rights struggles of the past were more dramatic than today, and both of those factors boosted the prominence of activism among the young. My point was, though, that even at the high-water mark of youth activism-- in the heady days of the 60's that people keep waxing rhapsodic about-- even then, the vast majority of young people were going about their business as usual, just like the vast majority of young people today, who are being condemned for not being active enough.
Jamie, it was my impression that your first comment was something less than civil to me, but let's chalk it up to different perceptions. I agree that most people go about their lives in a normal fashion in the midst of even the most shattering of social movements. That was true of the 1960s, and it was true even of the 1940s in the US, when millions of men were fighting and dying across the world but the main concern at home was how to sneak a few more gallons of gas without the proper ration cards (I do not speak from experience; I am not that old). As to whether young people are being condemned today, rightly or wrongly, or even at all - well, as I said, there has always been a clash of generations. Let's check the history books in, say, 2060, and see what those have to say about today.
Sorry, Chad, I mistakenly read your comment as coming from Jamie. But, as I said, I thought the original comment was a little uncivil. I'll try to read more carefully.
I rather think today's young people are smart enough to realize that walking around holding signs accomplishes very little, particularly with the problems we're facing today.