Damn Kids, Get Off My Lawn!

This article in the New York Times which many of you have probably read or at least read some of really made me want to set my own hair on fire.  Not because it was factually misleading in any way or because I felt it was being particularly unfair to my generation, but because it struck me as being similar to yelling at a houseplant for not thriving in your dank, windowless basement.  As I told a friend of mine who brought the article to my attention, it's not that we're lazy or shiftless or stupid…we just have nowhere to go but sideways!  We've thrown ourselves headlong into higher education and unpaid internships for lack of anything else to be done.  The only upside to this is that no generation in the history of the world should be as mentally and socially prepared to rule the world as we are—so long as we have not simply become professional understudies. 

I have a lot of really excellent memories from college.  Most of them aren't particularly sharp, however.  Many of them have grown fuzzy just over the last few years and a good chunk more were pretty damn muddled to begin with.  Surprisingly, some of the more crystalline episodes are the political debates/arguments/drunken-shouting-matches I engaged in with my roommates and friends.

I attended a college with a largely liberal faculty and a student body that was made up primarily of the conservative sons and daughters of the Northeast's Republicans.  The comedian Lewis Black took the stage on our campus by asking, "If you guys are conservatives now, what the fuck are you going to be when you're 45?  Nazis?!"  This demographic made for an interesting dichotomy and provided plenty of sparring partners for those of us who were politically aware and more progressively minded.   

During the "War-or-Bust" Media Blitzkrieg that ramped up in the early months of 2003 I found myself incessantly engaging in a losing battle with those who had been told or decided for themselves that invading Iraq was an appropriate response to 9/11 and that the war would pay for itself, among other things.  What struck me most about these skirmishes was not the delusions or cognitive dissonance of many of my classmates, but the sheer number of them that had never explored a single political train of thought in their lives.   A truly frightening number of my classmates didn't know what they were for or against because they didn't know who they were politically.  I don't mean that in the sense that they didn't identify with a party platform or know how to vote.  More viscerally, they had yet to discover the things that would make them tick politically and how to properly separate the politically motivated and simplified assertions from the complex realities.  And it's not all their fault.  They, like me, came of age in one of the most prosperous and politically vanilla decades in the 20th century.  There really wasn't much for us to cut our political teeth on back then.  We were perhaps just too young to grasp the first Gulf War and we certainly weren't going to get worked up over a blowjob.  Our first real taste of political blood came in 2000 with the election-that-wasn't-so-much, and even that went unmarked and unnoticed by the majority of my generation.  

But now we've had a few crash courses in realpolitik (two wars, a recession, bank bailouts, Healthcare reform, etc.) and we've begun to throw our not inconsiderable weight around (SEE: Election, Obama) and that's a good sign.  The question now, very well constructed by Dan Drezner, is what will become of our generation's politics now that we've seen and understood the politics (and consequences thereof) of our parent's generation.  They saw Vietnam and railed against it and yet here we are eight years into two occupational wars.  Are we going to make the same mistakes and believe that perhaps we can do better?  Will we become isolationist to a fault as a result of the overreach of those who came before?  The answers to these questions are several elections and perhaps a few world altering events away, but it's worth wondering, now that the baby boomer echo-wave has come out of its political shell, which way will we wander?