Youthy Haters at the NYTimes

Since when did it become the thing to do to hate on young people? This week the NYTimes has posted three articles the first saying we are meaningless non-voters the second Criticizing us for "delaying" things like marriage and permanent employment... And finally today's saying we're doing our civic duty but we're doing it all wrong because its too quite.

Generation FU needs to get off our backs.

Thomas Friedman begins today's piece all about exploring colleges and how confused he is.

"The Iraq war may be a mess, but I noticed at Auburn and Old Miss more than a few young men and women proudly wearing their R.O.T.C. uniforms. Many of those not going abroad have channeled their national service impulses into increasingly popular programs at home like “Teach for America,” which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine.

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them."

Why are these things all our burden? Why is it that the mistakes of Generation FU (aka 40+) suddenly require us to rise up and blow things up like some kind of psycho. I don't want to get tortured by Dick Cheney do you?

So we look at what is practical - what works, what will become a longterm investment in our future. I don't need to point out that we hold absolutely no cards at this stage in the game. We do not have representation to the youth in the White House, the closest person to our age in the US Senate is 40, and the 30 something Caucus has a hand full of people in it who I've never seen talk to us about ways to work together....

Wouldn't it be a smarter means of rebellion to create lasting, meaningful, revolution that is embedded into the culture rather than a short term hell raising weekend that just energizes our opposition and creates another counter-culture yuppy movement in our history??

As Mike Connery just said to me

"doesn't it make more sense for us to work towards gaining that power as quickly as possible rather than wasting our time in useless gestures and symbolism?"

A few weeks ago the winner was announced in an essay contest run by the New York Times. The winner was responding to an essay by Rick Perlstein called "What's the Matter with College," another anti-youth piece run that made the argument that young people need to rise up.

The winner, Nicholas Handler, says

"On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning–a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt."

As Mike Connery said so eloquently in an email to me - there is activism out there - it just takes on different forms.

"Al Gore and Friedman want us standing in front of bulldozers, but what does that accomplish? Protest is pretty dead as a viable form of activism. We're working within the system to change it. "

Friedman is quick to smackdown the internet as a "too quiet" form of revolution and goes on to say:

"Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual."

You can see just how old fashioned Mr. Friedman himself is. I didn't find Thomas Friedman on facebook. But I did find a special group called "Thomas Friedman: Bigoted Fool" that I joined right away... you know, to show my activism.

Mike says "the accomplishments of the blogosphere aren't symbolic, and FaceBook can be a valuable recruiting tool for youth nonprofit organizations that do real work. All of that builds power for young people in our public debate, and all of this is in addition to (not in place of), the work we are doing to build careers where we can push for socially responsible business."

If you further examine some of the sites we quote on here such as the National Conference on Citizenship Report (NcoC) with CIRCLE and Saguaro Seminar (Harvard). (page 17) that discusses "netizens," which are citizens are active online, you'll find further refutation to Friedman's thesis:

"Contrary to predictions that the Internet might replace face-to-face participation, the survey finds no trade off. In fact, the netizens are much more likely than other people to attend public meetings in which there was discussion of community affairs (38 percent versus 23 percent), attend a club meeting (72 percent versus 47 percent) or take part in a protest or demonstration (31 percent versus 15 percent)."

My assumption is that these Generation FU writers are too disconnected, too out of touch, and too old to recognize progress, rebellion, and meaningful action even with their bifocal lenses. Perhaps they should spend time talking to their kids about websites rather than having us just fix their computers the same way they want us to fix the society they screwed up. Perhaps they should spend more time talking to us about what we are doing rather than assuming it isn't well thought, well planned, or well organized before they pass judgment based clearly on ignorance.

Handler's piece ends as a well worded response to Friedman by saying

"College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words."