thomas friedman

In his usual ill-timed way, as “Occupy” protests started to spread across the country, columnist and author Tom Friedman used his appearance on MTV to tell ”young people [that they] need to be paying attention right now because we’re messing with your future.”

This was only the most recent occasion when Friedman suggested that today’s young people—the Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003)—are somehow too quiet, inattentive, or apathetic about the weighty issues that confront their generation and the nation. At least as far back as 2007, when the issue was the Iraq war, Friedman argued that Millennials should follow the example of his generation—Baby Boomers—and take to the streets to directly protest the war and confront the government that was waging it, even as Millennials were organizing to elect a presidential candidate who kept his promise to phase out America’s involvement in that conflict.

Millennials are not apathetic or inattentive. Given their relatively limited employment prospects, high student loan debts and the fact that it is their generation that makes up most of America’s fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan, it defies logic to suggest that Millennials are unaware of and do not care about what is going on around them.

In 2008, Millennials, for all practical purposes, elected President Obama. Turning out in larger numbers than young people had for decades and voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a greater than 2:1 margin (66% to 32%), their generation contributed about 80 percent of the president’s popular vote margin of victory. A recent CNN survey indicates that Obama maintains this same 2:1 lead among Millennials against all of his likely 2012 GOP opponents. (PDF) And, Millennials hold positions that are in almost total contrast to those of older generations on the range of issues that are currently the focus of debate in American politics. According to Pew Survey Research Center data, by a 54% to 39% margin Millennials favor a larger activist government that “provides more services” to a “smaller government that provides fewer services.” By 64% to 31% Millennials endorse gay marriage and by 69% to 26% they believe that immigrants strengthen rather than threaten American society and values.

Of course, Friedman might argue that just because Millennials have distinctive beliefs, they don’t seem to be very busy acting on those beliefs. Actually, however, Millennials are plenty busy. Perhaps if Friedman were to meet and talk with Millennials such as Hilary Doe, who heads the Roosevelt Institute’s Campus Network efforts to develop and implement a comprehensive program to reshape all aspects of American life by 2040 detailed in their Blueprint for a Millennial America, he might think differently about the level of public advocacy among Millennials. Or maybe he should observe the Millennial Leadership Summit in November in New York City where, Mobilize.org, the organization Maya Enista leads, will provide leadership development opportunities for already successful Millennial social entrepreneurs and encourage other members of the network to further develop their leadership skills..

Maybe Friedman is missing all of this involvement and hard work because what Millennials are doing and how they go about doing it doesn’t make for “good TV” like the “in your face” protest tactics that Friedman’s Boomer Generation used almost half a century ago. But despite Boomer fixation with the technology of their youth, just because it’s not on TV, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Millennials are neither inactive nor docile, but are working hard to fix the unresponsive institutions and inequitable systems they have inherited from earlier generations. If Boomers would take the time to look in the right places they would see—and maybe even feel good about—what Millennials are doing to clean up the mess that Friedman acknowledges his generation created for its kids and grandkids.

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics.

This Sunday's Meet the Press was themed "The Politics of the Economy: What's Holding America Back?" which featured a discussion between an uncharacteristically wide variety of thinkers across the political spectrum. It is, in part, a discussion we desperately need as we're thrown into this political turmoil between the Tea Party Republicans and the rest of the country. We are struggling at this crossroads to decide what kind of country we want to be.

In the past, I've had many disagreements with Thomas Friedman about the role he believes my generation should play as we begin to take over the country. But today, much like that fabled broken clock, I found myself in much agreement as Friedman spoke about the differences between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom Generation. He argues this problem began not in 2008, instead it began after the Cold War ended in 1980:

"We had a generational shift. We went from the Greatest Generation which the philosophy basically was "save and invest" and we are still living off of their saving and investing. To the Baby Boom Generation whose philosophy turned out to be "borrow and spend." And we've really shifted from a generation born in The Depression, World War 2, and the Cold War, these were serious people. They wouldn't think of shutting down the government for a minute, ok. To a generation basically that is much less serious. We've gone from basically the values of the Greatest Generation, which my friend philosopher Doug Simon calls "sustainable values." Values that sustain. To a Baby Boom Generation whose values are situational values. Do whatever the situation allows. You put them all together and I think you really account for a lot of the hole we're in right now structurally."

Friedman goes on to say, that instead of being the drivers of innovation and a world leader that, we spent the 2000's "chasing the losers of globalization instead of the winners," referring to our wars across the Middle East.

Friedman discusses the "Five Pillars" which enabled us to grow and thrive as a country and as a government for 200 years.

"We didn't get here by accident. As a great country. We actually won at every historical turn. How did we win in every historical turn? Because we had a formula for success. That you can actually date back to Hamilton but you certainly see it in Lincoln. It was five pillars: basically educate our people up to and beyond whatever the level of technology is. Whether it's the cotton gin or the supercomputer. Immigration: attract the world's most talented and energetic people. Third, infrastructure. Have the world's best infrastructure. Fourth, have the right rules for enchanting capital formation and risk taking and preventing recklessness. And last, government-funded research. Put those together, stir, bake for 200 years and you get the United States of America.

If you take all five of those, David, and you look at the last decade, which we call 'the terrible 2's,' possibly the worst if not the worst decades in American History. Education (makes a downward gesture). Infrastructure (makes a downward gesture). Immigration (makes a downward gesture). Rules for Capital Investment, how'd you like that sub-prime crisis? (makes a downward gesture) Research and Development (makes a downward gesture). So all five of our pillars of success have been weakened. That's the underlying theme here. And that's what we've got to be looking; that's what the President has got to be out there defending."

Earlier in the program, Friedman said that he believes there are two types of countries: HIEs and LIEs. In Friedman vernacular, that means high imagination enabling countries and low imagination enabling countries and details the ease of building a product and bringing it to market.

"Forget developing and developed. . . . what isn't a commodity is this (Friedman says snapping his fingers meaning ideas). If you look at the countries that are thriving today, look at Israel - start-up nation. We're not going to bail our way out of this crisis. We're not going to stimulate our way out of this crisis. We're ultimately going to educate, imagine, and invent our way out of this crisis."

Unfortunately, it appears that the Friedman is putting the cart before the horse. While the solution is no doubt going to be innovation, with the weakening of those five pillars consistently by conservative politics, where will these educated, imaginative and inventive people going to come from?

In a totally separate portion of the program, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and her son, Lt. Joseph K. Goodwin, talked about being part of the generation that began after the Cold War and the impact 9/11 had on what is now termed the Millennial Generation. He believes 9/11 presented a unique opportunity that was missed by leaders. After Pearl Harbor, our country was thrown into a great war in which the entire country was invested. Women immediately took over the work force as every man in the country became a soldier. Children collected rubber bands to be melted down; women drew "seams" on the back of their legs so that silk production could be redirected to parachutes instead of hose; food, gas and even clothing was rationed. In short, everyone sacrificed and contributed towards the war effort.

After 9/11, America was never asked to sacrifice or contribute anything. Lt. Goodwin says this is the reason that he feels we're have so much debt and financial troubles now, because we charged the wars on our credit card. As Friedman would say we allowed the situational values of our leaders enact a policy that cost us so much that our entire country stands on the brink of both an economic and even identity crash. Lt. Goodwin believes if we as a country had been asked to sacrifice as much as they were in WWII that maybe we wouldn't be here.

If Lt. Goodwin believes that 9/11 won't be what defines a generation, perhaps the Millennials can decide to define themselves as the "Ideas Generation" that Friedman says is so needed to build us back into a stable economy and a world leader. In a recent piece by Mike Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover and the new book Millennial Momentum, the two authors argue that indeed this generation -- which will comprise more than 1 in 3 adults by the end of the decade -- can be the drivers of this economy if given the tools and authority to do so. Instead of the "taking to the street" philosophy that Friedman has advocated in the past, perhaps he can get on board with more of an innovative bandwagon.

Crossposted from CrooksAndLiars.com

If you have followed Future Majority over the last couple years, you will recognize that Thomas Friedman's hit piece on Millennials, labeling them "Generation Q" for being too quiet, serves as the foundation for many a post. His Boomer paradigm interferes with his ability to understand how Millennial activism differs.

Friedman argues that Millennials may be "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." The problem most of us had with Friedman's writing was that he was unable to see that one could be mad, could be online, and could be productive all at once. Another issue was the power Friedman ascribed to symbolic and yet meaningless acts. What good is chaining one's self to a bulldozer actually going to accomplish long-term? Very little.

With that in mind, we now have some more information regarding college students' heavy use of social media, and it is easy to see how our activism has changed course. The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland released a study revealing the considerable depth of students' connections to social media.

200 University of Maryland (College Park) students, as part of a class assignment, were asked to abstain from all media for 24 hours straight. Following this time window, they were then asked to describe their experiences in private blogs. Perhaps the most interesting nugget of information this study yielded was just how interwoven social media has become in 18-21 year olds' lives.

"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller. "And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."

The student responses to the assignment showed not just that 18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook -- with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends -- but that students' lives are wired together in such ways that opting out of that communication pattern would be tantamount to renouncing a social life.

Bringing this back to the Friedman contention that students should cut out the online crap and do something meaningful with their lives, this survey points to how misguided Friedman actually was in his writing. Social media is so pervasive and such a large part of our world that it is rewiring our brains. As the piece argues above, there is no exiting the social media world to "act" in the real world. To the wide majority of young people, social media is reality. If one had to renounce his or her social life in order to please Friedman, the activism would not mean anything.

Another enlightening conclusion was the impact the abstention from media had on these students' information-gathering capabilities. Participants in the study reported that they normally do not read the newspaper, watch mainstream television news, or listen to radio news, yet they were informed enough to discuss specific news stories. During the study, though, participants remarked on how uninformed they felt.

..."To be entirely honest I am glad I failed the assignment," wrote one student, "because if I hadn't opened my computer when I did I would not have known about the violent earthquake in Chile from an informal blog post on Tumblr."

"Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information," observed Ph.D. student Raymond McCaffrey, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, and a current researcher on the study. "One student said he realized that he suddenly 'had less information than everyone else, whether it be news, class information, scores, or what happened on Family Guy."

"They care about what is going on among their friends and families and even in the world at large," said McCaffrey. " But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet."

Students clearly rely on social media for information. Given our knowledge -- going clear back to Thomas Jefferson -- that information is vital in managing our country's affairs, dispensing with internet-based activism would be foolish and regressive, breeding even more disengagement and misinformation.

Friedman's Boomer lens assumes that we still have a critical mass of institutions that need tearing down, and that it needs to happen quickly. These Millennial college students, as Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out, understand how decentralized our lives are, and, in role-modeling their "civic" archetype, they must rely on these anything-but-linear connections and the decentralized flow of information to reconstruct society.

Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras. In the decades after the 1828 election, the country was pulled apart over slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War. After the 1896 campaign, the United States couldn't find a way to help blue-collar workers and farmers to share fully in the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took the Great Depression to usher in the sense of urgency that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, issues such as affordable health care or quality education or climate change are endlessly debated but never resolved by two sides unwilling to set aside their ideological agendas for the common good.

But now, with another civic generation emerging, the times, as boomer troubadour Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin'. Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues. Previous civic realignments occurred in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1932, when the GI generation put Roosevelt in office. It's no coincidence that these "civic" presidents, along with George Washington, top all lists of our greatest presidents. All three led the country in resolving great crises by inspiring and guiding new generations and revitalizing and expanding the federal government.

In their book Millennial Makeover, Winograd and Hais describe technology as "[enabling] these changes by creating powerful new ways to reach new generations of voters with messages that relate directly to their concerns" (p. 24). Yes, face-to-face interaction continues to have its place in our society. However, if we were to scrap our reliance on social media, we would be willfully ignoring the new generations of voters Winograd and Hais mention. This study's results underscore how vital social media is to our generation's civic health. If we were to purge ourselves of our internet activism, only then could we legitimately be considered "quiet."

Last weekend, our friend Thomas Friedman argued that while things are looking up for China these days, America still holds on to the title of "World's Greatest Dream Machine." Unfortunately, Friedman writes, imagination does not translate into good governance. Friedman argues that the increased fragmentation of American society has rendered it incapable of producing optimal solutions to its problems. Friedman's answer?

The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things. Otherwise, folks, we’re in trouble. A great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power — no matter how much imagination it generates.

Okay, we can work with that. The generic call for more citizenship is a good step for Friedman. But as Peter Levine notes, Friedman stops at generalities when we need something more.

I agree with [the notion that we need better citizens] and have staked my whole career on this premise. But how do you get 'better citizens'? ... I welcome Friedman's conclusion but wish he would get behind concrete solutions.

Levine asserts that any plan to reform the nation's media to encourage better citizenship skills is ill-fated; the increased fragmentation of interests, opinions, and messages prevents even our most charismatic of messengers (Barack Obama) from clearly communicating to the rest of society. Instead, Levine suggests that the development of better citizens can be found in two strategies.

1. Get them while they're young, receptive, and a captive audience. Build really engaging, unbiased, motivating, and informative civic education into the school curriculum. My blog posts categorized as advocating civic education and a high school civic curriculum are about that.

2. Reform institutions so that hands-on participation by ordinary adults is welcomed and rewarding. The theory is that people who see tangible impact from their own civic engagement (mainly at the local level) will want to be informed and to exchange ideas and perspectives with people different from themselves. My blog posts about deliberation and civic reform are about that.

I wholeheartedly agree with Levine's approach and felt it was important to echo this here. We should be doing everything possible, working with organizations like the National Center for Learning and Citizenship (NCLC), to infuse civics education into K-12 education as much as possible. Levine's second strategy is particularly apt in discussions regarding youth involvement in political parties. In 2008, for example, youth were still struggling for representation near the top of the Democratic Party. To create better citizens, targeting education to the young and increasing access to opportunities are far and away better solutions than simply restating the problem.

What is it with Thomas Friedman and his insults? First, he wrote that Millennials were too quiet, too wrapped up in the internet to care about the country's direction. He then came back last December and tried to argue again that because we're not chaining ourselves to bulldozers, we're not doing anything and thus don't care about the trajectory of the country.

Yesterday, Friedman again assailed millennials, equating Facebook and other social network sites with laziness and apathy. The offending passage is in the last paragraph:

And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.

Emphasis added.

The Energy Action Coalition pieced together a response it blasted to its e-mail list. I've provided it below:

As a young person, you care about global warming. You know that a clean energy economy will create millions of jobs and pathways out of poverty, reduce pollution, and save the planet. And you are willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Right?

Well, Thomas L. Friedman, the popular New York Times columnist, isn't convinced. In fact, Friedman concludes his latest column* by calling us out! He writes:

"Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway…. Play hardball or don't play at all."

Does Friedman have a point? Do we need to be bigger and louder?

I think the answer is yes.

Don't get me wrong -- I know that thousands of young people across this country are working tirelessly to usher in a clean and just energy future for us all. But if we want to truly achieve our goals, we need our elected officials to know that we are watching closely as they debate the climate policy that will shape the rest of our lives.

Take the first step. Let President Obama and your Senators know that you demand bold, just, and science-based climate solutions, and ask your friends and family to do the same.

Let's send a strong message to our President and Senators that we're here, we're watching, and we're ready for action. And let's ask our friends and families to do the same. It's going to take big numbers to fight back against the thousands of letters and calls generated by the dirty energy industry (not to mention their well-paid lobbyists).

Send a message to the President and your Senators, and forward this email to everyone you know.

But we know that sending email isn't enough. In order to drown out the voice of the dirty energy industry, we're going to need to mobilize in unprecedented numbers. Tom Friedman isn't kidding when he suggests we should have a million people marching in the streets.

Ready to take a bigger step? Sign up to be a leader in your community, and to help get millions of feet in the streets for climate solutions.

We've gone big before, but now we need to go bigger. And the only way we will get there is if people like you do more. Ready to take a bigger step? Sign up today to get active in your community, to get in the faces of our elected officials, and to recruit the huge movement it will take to win.

In it to win it,

Whit Jones
Acting Field Director
Energy Action Coalition

While the e-mail was inspirational enough, the problem with Friedman's column is that he once again lacks the understanding that change can be accomplished through a variety of means. Friedman (and there are many more who think just like him) discounts activism through institutions as nothing. In doing so, he insults those youth already busting their ass for this legislation and movement. For instance did Friedman say anything when Powershift '09 brought 11,000 youth activists to DC urging the government to act? Who was quiet then?

Granted, Whit's right -- we all can be a little louder on the issue, but it doesn't have to be limited to getting in the streets. We can continue our own brand of activism by using our technological proficiency and collaborative skills to push for the bill's passage. Yes, the bill's important (even if it has been watered down); but the 1960s are over. Youth have a plethora of tools at their disposal to create the change they wish to see. Unfortunately, Friedman either doesn't understand that, or doesn't want to.

We've cited Thomas Friedman's attack on the Millennials, which he labeled "Generation Q," many a time here. Young people today are too quiet, Friedman wrote, arguing that our timidity is a sign that we're apathetic and not concerned with the world around us going to hell in a handbasket.

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.

[...]

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

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.

Then, on December 7, 2008, Friedman again pricks young people, labeling our generational philosophy as "quietism" in the context of arguing for responsible spending in the stimulus bill.

Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today. I understand why they aren’t. They’re so worried about just getting a job or paying next semester’s tuition. But we must not take their quietism as license to do whatever we want with this bailout cash. They are going to have to pay this money back. And therefore, we have an incredibly weighty obligation to make sure that we not only spend every stimulus dollar wisely but also with an eye to creating new technologies.

So today, Friedman's piece is written about an experience he had in India with young American women while attending the Energy and Resources Institute Climate Conference. While there, two young Americans and one of their mothers asked Friedman to take a ride with them in a plug-in electric- and solar-powered car. Friedman, impressed, says yes, and away they go.

Friedman learns about the friends' partnership with the Indian Youth Climate Network, which now connects climate leaders from across the country, and he's amazed. The women tell him of their "climate caravan," which they organized to spread the message of energy conservation. Environmentally-friendly solar-powered and electric cars were donated by an Indian electric car company (one of the women knew the CEO), and the women then hopped inside them, traveling 2,100 miles across India, organizing entertainment at each stop to attract interest. The women trained local youth to begin their own initiatives.

Friedman sounds verklempt as he wraps up his column.

I met Howe and Ringwald after a tiring day, but I have to admit that as soon as they started telling me their story it really made me smile. After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.

A couple possibilities here.

1.) Friedman has seen the light, realizing that Millennials aren't "quiet," but have a different way of going about things than Friedman's generation.

2.) Millennial activism in America doesn't count for anything in Friedman's eyes, but in India -- it's worth a few hundred words in the New York Times.

I'm hoping it's numero uno, and that Friedman never uses the word "quiet" again.

And let's get something else straight -- the reason I write about Friedman is not a demonstration of the vanity that sometimes is ascribed to Millennials. I really don't care what Friedman himself thinks about young people. But I do care about others being fooled into thinking young people aren't doing anything simply because Friedman can't handle the philosophical discrepancy between the way his generation did things and the way ours does. Hopefully Friedman took care of that with his trip to India and his car ride.

Friedman aside, kudos to those young women -- Caroline Howe and Alexis Ringwald -- for doing their part by piecing together a great program that is truly making a difference.

Bumped. As always, Fred hits the nail on the head. --Mike

A clear conscience, maybe?

We rightfully spend a great deal of our time mocking the idiots pundits who used to control the national narrative however they pleased. It's annoying for everyone involved, it's tiresome for us, but it's important to keep it up. These people need to be discredited because they are so wrong about so many deadly things. I encourage us all to keep it up. Mock the stupid pundits more. To this effort, I'll contribute this Little Tommy Friedman insight.

As Markos said:

The guy who was wrong about Iraq time and time again, yet has kept his job and profited handsomely from it, is going to argue that other people should lose their jobs for being wrong?

Perhaps all Detroit needs is six more months.

I last made fun of this asshat prince of the cantankerous, curmudgeon commentariat when he said that young people's political activism was altogether too Facebookey. We needed to do less online organizing, he said, and more direct protests in the style of chaining ourselves to bulldozers, and the like.

Since then, young politically minded Americans continued to disappoint Friedman by using the internet and cellphones to pointlessly (aka no bulldozers):

1. WIN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.
2. Organize nationwide protests against the passing of Prop-8

Really, what more does he want of us, exactly?

This?


Protesters throwing stones at riot police in Athens on Tuesday. (Petros Giannakouris/The Associated Press)
As riots continue, Greece faces mounting political crisis

Of course not.

Of course the rich, pampered, chest-thumper Friedman, with his net worth of $25m, a palatial 11,400-square-foot mansion in Bethesda worth $10m, doesn't want mass unrest and a class war.

So therefore, I call bullshit. Increasingly, what this man peddles is classic ex-liberal guilt-speak. The country was awash with this crap in 1999 surrounding the anti-W.T.O. "Battle in Seattle."

One of the reasons so many media gatekeepers were so quick to dismiss the anti-IMF/WTO movement as illegitimate, or anarchist, or insane was pure guilt. When they were younger, before they had nice offices at the paper or the network, the gatekeepers I describe participated in the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, they had participated in the anti-Vietnam movement, and maybe even the anti-Nuclear movement.

Proud, they felt this burnished their credentials as good people and even as truth-tellers. That they weren't in on this new movement frightened them because it undercut their sense of selves as good people. This new movement couldn't be real or they'd be in on it. This new movement was a threat to them and they tried to destroy it. As a result, upwards of 60 indyMedia outlets were created to broadcast the news story that they refused to cover. Even back then, the revolution happened online.

Today, because the New Media revolution and the progressive movement are so intrinsically wired together, and both are so heavily dependent on internet-enabled strengths of decentralization, distribution and collaboration, this new force is a threat to the Gatekeepers.

They have to delegitimize us as somehow not a real movement, or not real organizers, or our victories as not real political wins, or our tools as not real at all. So they undercut blogs, mock social networks, complain about our peaceful emails organizing millions. We can't be as real as they were when they were the young insurgents. Meanwhile, our narratives go under their radar and we increasingly learn to ignore their crumbling gates. Good for us. But as we continue to outgrow Friedman's gate, I believe that for good measure we must remember to inject requisite mockery.

Little Tommy Friedman might come around, give him six months.

On October 10th of last year, Thomas Friedman wrote about The Millennial Generation, showing everyone that his "expertise" on foreign affairs and energy policy doesn't extend to generational discussion.

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.

...

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Friedman waded into generational waters again this morning, and while the content was slightly better (the overall gist of the column made good points), he showed again that he does not understand the Millennial brand of activism.

The carnage was mostly restricted to the intro:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” that classic about our parents and their incredible sacrifices during World War II. What I’ve been thinking about actually is this: What book will our kids write about us? “The Greediest Generation?” “The Complacent Generation?” Or maybe: “The Subprime Generation: How My Parents Bailed Themselves Out for Their Excesses by Charging It All on My Visa Card.”

Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today. I understand why they aren’t. They’re so worried about just getting a job or paying next semester’s tuition. But we must not take their quietism as license to do whatever we want with this bailout cash. They are going to have to pay this money back. And therefore, we have an incredibly weighty obligation to make sure that we not only spend every stimulus dollar wisely but also with an eye to creating new technologies.

Friedman is still on his radical shtick, once again arguing that times are so dire that we need to sit in the streets and chain ourselves to bulldozers. Friedman believes that the only way to act with urgency is to go crazy, like much of the Boomer activists did, marching in streets, braving teargas, screaming chants, and disrupting society. But we know that we can show appreciation for how urgent this moment is in our own way. Today's youth were involved in this election at a rate not seen since 1972. CIRCLE finds that about 23 million young Americans cast a ballot this year, over 3 million more than the number in 2004. How many times do we need to cite data that shows that Millennials volunteer at record rates? Friedman once again equates activism with being "radical," and he's wrong.

Friedman writes about Millennials as if we're still seven years old, too distracted with getting the latest toy that comes with our Happy Meal to understand what's going on. Friedman acts like we're impotent, like we didn't just make history ourselves, uniting behind a candidate, sweeping him through the Democratic primary and into the White House. Yes, Tom, that happened. And we did it.

Boomers do owe us. They got us into this mess. Millennials aren't being "quiet" because we're not aware of what's going on. We're doing our thing, working through the establishment, changing the system from the inside out. And we're also watching to make sure the Baby Boomers stay focused on their "weighty obligation." We've already turned the political world upside down. We're not afraid to do it again.

So remember when Tom Friedman was running around spilling all that ink about how young Millennials aren't as involved as their parents were back in the 60's? There was a huge response from the youth community noting that many of today's climate activists - and other activists - are taking a more pragmatic approach to their activism.

It was around that same time that fellow Boomer Al Gore, lamented the fact that young people weren't chaining themselves to bulldozers to stop the construction of more carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants.

Well, apparently we do that too. From It's Getting Hot in Here:

Yesterday, Earth First and Rising Tide blockaded a gas-fired power plant construction site in Palm Beach County, Florida near “the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge which sits 1000 ft from the power plant site.”

27 people were arrested putting their bodies on the line with over 200 people rallying in support. The action stopped construction on the site for six hours.

A whole 6 hours. Not really that effective as a tactic. I wonder if Friedman will cover it?

Regular readers know that we don't like Tom Friedman around here, mostly for reasons well-stated here. He has regularly criticized young people for not taking action on the issues of the day, typically defining action as "yelling and screaming on campus quads with witty signage." So I was surprised to read his column on climate change in this weekend's edition of the New York Times.

Last week, I also met with two groups of M.I.T. students who blew me away. One was the M.I.T. Energy Club, which was founded in 2004 by a few grad students discussing energy over beers at a campus bar. Today it has 600-plus members who have put on scores of events focused on building energy expertise among M.I.T. students and faculty, and “fact-based analysis,” including a trip to Saudi Arabia.

Then I got together with three engineering undergrads who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit — a global, open-source, collaborative effort, managed by M.I.T. students, that has 25 college teams around the world, including in India and China, working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years. Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, “will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave” and provide “200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.” The Linux of cars!

They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope:

“We are the people we have been waiting for.”

Shocking as it is, Friedman is giving props to young people for organizing effectively around the issue of climate change on the campus of MIT. Not by waving signs, but by building shit that actually prevents global warming. Either Friedman is slowly learning two things that we all know already - that activism can be a cultural and social experience, and that young people today are pragmatic and working within and through institutions to accomplish change that his generation has thus far been unwilling to make - or he is somehow managing to keep his head from exploding from the cognitive dissonance of his two world views.