The latest in a long line of aging, center-left laments that young people these days do not precisely resemble a stereotypical image of 1960's left-wing American political activism comes from Sally Cohn in the Christian Science Monitor:
Coming together in local committees, led mainly by young people, they used the tools of face-to-face community organizing, developing shared strategies to address shared problems. And they took shared action; in sit-ins and Freedom Rides, they formed groups that were more than the sum of individual parts.
By contrast, Internet activism is individualistic. It's great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and '70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there.
There is nothing new about this lament. Last year, Al Gore wondered why "there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants." Two months later, Thomas Friedman pined:
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.
The sentiment that young people these days just rely too much on the Internet and are not properly emulating, in precise terms, now stereotypical images of left-wing activism from the third quarter of the twentieth century, has been around for a while. Eight years ago, I remember the poet Ron Silliman saying a variation on the same theme when he was the guest instructor in a graduate seminar I was taking. It is a bizarre and aggravating charge that willfully ignores all of the following:
The civil rights and anti-war rallies / acts of civil disobedience that took place from 1957-1973 were attended by people of all ages, not just young people. While no figures are available, it is probably safe to assume that more than half of the people who participated in those protests were actually over the age of 30.
Not everyone who grew up in the 1957-1973 time period took part in direct, left-wing activism. As much as the time period is often remembered for its rallies and activism, the truth is that most young people from that time period were not left-wing activism. In fact, according to a 2005 study by GQR, Boomers are actually-by a long, long way--the most self-identified Republican generation in a century.
Boomers were not the main protesters in the 1950's and 1960's. In 1969, the oldest Boomers were only 23 years old. As such, great civil rights actions, from sit-ins to the Freedom Riders, that largely took place before 1965, were conducted almost entirely by pre-Boomer generations. Certainly, the organizers were all from earlier generations.
Anyone can protest now, despite their age. If people are still dissatisfied by the amount of protests and acts of civil disobedience, they should keep in mind that anyone can engage in such actions, not just people under the age of 30. Hard to see how the blame rests on a single age group.
While it is quaint to pine for an age of activism past, the truth is that the Internet is not going away anymore than TV was supposedly going to die off in the 1950's. As such, rather than complaining about it, people would be wise to figure out how to better adopt activism with it.
While I constantly read about these young people who only and ever interact with other humans online, I haven't actually met any of those people. This even goes for me, despite making a living by writing online for more than four years now.
What I really wonder about is why are statements that assign values, perspectives and lifestyle habits to people based on their age not considered offensive--or at least just stupid--in American political discourse? As Paul Rosenberg noted last week, assigning derogatory values, such as not being properly politically active, to entire groups of people based on the identity characteristics of that group is, in fact, a form of hate speech. This is a pretty mild form of hate speech to be sure, but it is still prejudicial, stereotypical and, even though it comes from progressives, actually conservative.
Generational warfare and generational boosting are two sides of the same prejudicial coin. They are also both willfully and woefully inaccurate. It just isn't true that Boomers were an entire generation of DFH's who grew up as Freedom Riders and began organizing massive anti-war protests at the age of 16. It also isn't true that everyone under 30 spends 12 hours on Facebook everyday, and never encounters other human beings expect online. Just as there are lots of apathetic and / or conservative Boomers, there are lots of apathetic and / or conservative Millenials. To be sure, there are somewhat fewer conservative Millenials than Boomers, but that is largely a function of the younger generation being far less white, Christian than the older generation, not because of a difference in either age or Internet usage.
I honestly don't know where the impulse to broadly assign personality characteristics to Americans based on their birthdays comes from, but I would like to see a lot less of it. It is surprising how openly such stereotypes are tolerated in our discourse, even as other forms of prejudice continue to fall out of fashion.
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