The Paradox of the Sidekick Generation

Okay, I know I am going to get roasted once again by the old fogies of my generation, the generation of ’68, but I like the breath of fresh air that is coming from today’s youth. That, at this moment, gets its fullest expression in their support in sizable numbers for the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Now let me go through the numbers. No, I do not believe that the election of Obama is the solution to our problems. No, I do not believe that the Democratic Party is the vehicle for social change in the 21st century. No, I do not believe that youth as they have expressed themselves thus far are going to be able to solve the problems confronting us in the 21st century. Are we clear so far? A critical mass of youth though is forming that may just do that. That is what I like to think about today.

What I do not like about today’s youth is their expressed disdain for our old political visions. You know, the culture wars that we have been fighting for the past forty years to try to save a few human and civil rights from the demons of the right whose conception of society is that of a prison camp. We might not have been successful in getting our program through. We may have made every political mistake in the book in fight for such things as black civil rights, the fight against the death penalty, against war, for women’s rights, and so forth but we fought and that is the lesson that today’s youth seemingly has not learned. To create social change one must fight for it, tooth and nail.

A recent article in the February 3, 2008 Sunday Boston Globe brought this fierce truth home. The article interviewed students at Wellesley College and Yale University (admittedly not today’s average youth and selected because those were Hillary Clinton’s alma maters). Almost universally they were either dismissive or ignorant of the struggles of the past that we fought out. We were viewed as too confrontational, too argumentative and sin of sins, well, too political. I do believe we have some work to do here.

That said, what youth can do, or more particularly today a small section, is to take their first blush understanding that there is a need for social change and move on from there to find social, and thereafter socialist, solutions to the problems that ail us. Now back to my generation as a reference point. As the now numerous memoirs of some of the leading lights of the time have noted most of us took the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960 as a signal that it was alright to fight for social change. Did we assume that we could do that solely by the parliamentary path? At first, probably. Did we think that Kennedy’s program would provide the answers? In the end, hell no, a thousand times no. As a comparison that is the significance of Obama. And it is significant. The winds of change do blow.

Below is a repost of a commentary that I did last year that in connection with the above commentary can stand together as the first shots of the political fight to win the youth to social activism.

On Political Trends Among American Youth

COMMENTARY

WELL, BACK IN MY DAY WE………

Although a number of my political efforts these days are linked to appealing to the youth to learn the lessons of our history, working class history, I make no bones about feelings of trepidation when I take up the subject of youth, their hopes and their aspirations. That said, I recently read an interesting review article based on polls taken of youth (18-24) and their political aspirations. The major conclusion of the article was that today’s youth are trending (the poll’s expression, not mine) to vote Democratic in greater numbers than previous youth generations. A couple of minor conclusions were that youth have more potential impact on politics today than my generation, the generation of 1968, and that the current more technologically savvy generation was not reachable by traditional methods of communication and thus political organizations needed to catch up with the wave. Fair enough. Let me make some observations.


The generation of 1968 made every mistake in the political book. And that ain’t no lie. In our defense I will add that we were in uncharted waters facing such legitimate political monsters as Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace who were fully capable of using all of the methods of political repression. Nevertheless we tried non-violent protest in the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King. We tried peaceful protest against Vietnam under Dr. Spock and others. We tried parliamentary politics under Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy. We tried to drop out with Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and other counter-cultural heroes. We tried to make music the revolution. When things started to get grim in 1967 we tried to ‘raise’ the Pentagon. When things got grimmer still we tried to act as a second front for the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. When they got really grim we were ready to declare revolutionary war on America. Ah, those were the days. We were, however, for a number of reasons, politically defeated. A defeat from which we still have not recovered.

Obviously, every political generation will find its own means of expressing itself in a world that it has not made. Also fair enough. However, after a few years of opposition to this Iraq war I find that the current ‘youth’ generation seems much more politically passive and lacking in political imagination than the poll mentioned above would indicate. One of the most striking points about the survey is the apparent faith that today’s youth have in letting governmental agencies and officials resolve certain questions. By this I assume that Mr. Bush or his successor, probably Hillary Clinton at this point, is duly appointed to resolve the conflict in Iraq and such other questions as the on-going genocide in Dhafur.

In my day, while we had more than our share of illusions in the good graces of the government we were much more ready to face it down than rely on it. As a case in point, someone like Hillary Clinton (nee Rodham) who may have passed for a ‘radical’ at sedate 1960’s Wellesley would not even have gotten, nor should she have gotten, a hearing from the more thoughtful radical political types in the Boston area of the time. The time of waving the Vietnamese National Liberation Front flag at the front of anti-war marches was not Hillary’s time. Her time, if it is now, is the time of many, many defeats for progressive movements and a time of youth ‘trending’ Democratic. To put the situation in perspective I would argue that the political development of today’s youth was about what my generation’s was in 1962. Plenty of spunk, a desire to serve humanity, and plenty of illusions and faith in the ‘fairness’ of the democratic process. But, which way will they jump?

Seemingly each generation develops their own tribal language, fashions and other such cultural gradients to distinguish it from the OTHER. Once again fair enough. The survey mentioned above made an express point that today’s youth cannot be reached by traditionally methods of communication and/or advertising. And that makes sense about a generation nurtured on iPods, e-mails, chat rooms and cell phones. In short, today’s youth are light years ahead of my generation on the information super-highway. Or are they?

No one can reasonably deny that the Internet has a great potential as an aid to political development and organization. However, it is no substitute for face-to-face polemics and argument to develop strategy and to clarify political positions. From my own personal experience I find that one can spent so much time on the Internet that there is little time to get out and do the necessary political spade work. Multiply that by ubiquitous cell phone and iPod use and where is there time for organizing real people in real time. And that brings us back to that point I made above about the political passivity of this generation. If the revolution will not be televised it will also certainly not spring forth from a laptop. More on this later.