WaPo Editorial: Young People Don't Know, Don't Care
h/t to Mike at Future Majority
There was an article in Sunday's Washington Post that accused young people of not knowing much about politics, not caring much, being too cynical, you know... all the usual scolding. There are grains of truth to it, of course, but the overall argument is simply BS. Admittedly, I say a lot of the same stuff sometimes, but always with the implied asterisk that there's a growing movement composed of beautiful, beautiful exceptions.
For the most part, we are a cynical bunch. And on the whole, it's true, we don't hit the streets to protest very much. And yeah, there are definitely a lot of idiots in our ranks. But all those things can be said of any generation. It's not fair to single us out for what's really a much, much wider problem.
The author, Naomi Wolf, starts by describing an exchange she had with a young person who said she felt powerless. What follows is the dumbest paragraph I've seen in the Washington Post in a long time (and that's saying a lot):
I stared at her in amazement and asked how old she was. When she said 26, I suggested that she run for city council. Then she stared at me-- with complete incomprehension. It took me a long time to convince her and her peers in the audience that what I'd suggested was possible, even if she didn't have money, a major media outlet of her own or a political "machine" behind her.
Uhhhhm. Stared at her in amazement? What the hell? You can't just run for city council! Running for office is a $hady, tediou$, draining, lonnnng process that requires practical abandonment of any other goals you might have (unless that IS your goal, in which case you can't be trusted anyway, but I digress) and temporary suspension of your ideals (that easily leads to permanent loss of them), and even if you "win" the election, you still lose, because now you're stuck in the middle of an institution full of the old (probably conservative) hacks who pissed you off enough to run for office in the first place.
Yeah, good luck with that...
Like I said at the start, we're not the most politically active generation, but that doesn't mean we're stupid: on the contrary, it just proves how perceptive and pragmatic we are. We grew up watching some of the most incompetent, corrupt, petty governing in American history. Bush was just the icing on the cake -- the system's been in decay since before we were born. Long before we were born.
Some of the article focuses on ignorance caused by lack of civic education. I wonder whose responsibility THAT was --- the 40, 50, and 60 year-old administrators and politicians in 1997 or us kids in the classrooms?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...........
Bluntly: for an old person to bitch about young people not having faith in our ability to change the system is like blaming the newest symptom of a disease for causing the disease in the first place. The author provides some quotes from young people, citing them as evidence that we don't understand how democracy works. The quotes:
"Congress is bought and paid for."
"Elections are just a front for corporations."
"My teacher says you shouldn't believe anything you read in the newspapers at all," a 16-year-old from affluent Menlo Park, Calif., told me last week.
AHEM, AHEM. Congress IS bought and paid for. Elections ARE just a front for corporations. And Hell no, you CAN'T believe anything you read in the papers. We saw what happened with the Iraq debate in 2002-2003, so now we know. And knowing is half the battle!
The article then names a bunch of active young people from the 1960s with the absolute-bullshit implication that we don't have people like that and then paints us all with that broad brush we're so used to feeling from big media journalists.
When I ask young people today whether they've been taught that immense positive changes have come about because small groups of people engaged in democratic practices, many look at me with puzzlement. They need a crash course in democracy -- and a crash course in how easy it is to close down an open society if steps are taken such as those we see our government taking now.
Easy? Ms. Wolf, what part of "3 billion dollar presidential election" don't you understand?
But all that being said, miraculously, there are a lot of us whose idealism survived that onslaught as we came of age. That we're quietly building movements, albeit disconnected ones, on par with some of the stuff the '60s kids came up with is equally amazing. I'd also wager we're the most creative generation in history, and notably a lot of it's rooted in rebellion against these institutions we're often so cynical about.
To be fair, I think Naomi Wolf's goal with her editorial is to encourage young people to be more active and it's a good objective, one that I share. But when the content consists of a lot of nagging generalizations that disregard the segment of our generation that's been trying really hard to be active, even despite all the writing on the wall, that goal suffers.
This is not all of us:
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