If you’ve never had anything to fight for, how do you know how to fight?
As the youth in Syria, Egypt and Yemen take to Facebook and Twitter to organize their fight for scraps of freedom, here in the United States, our youth is pretty content with waiting for someone else to wage the battle. Or at least that’s what David Weidner is proposing in the Wall Street Journal article, Facebook Chronicles a Lost Generation.
The article opens with, “Is there a revolution brewing in America,” but the real question seems to be, Why isn’t there a revolution brewing in America?
Few would say that young Americans are without opinion, but for some reason that voice is lacking unity and follow-through. The Occupy Wall Street protest demonstrates, more than anything else, that we don’t have a clue how to start a revolution. The message is weak and unfocused, the turnout has been humble, and the media coverage has amounted to no more than a few blips here and there. Squatting in a park and blocking traffic, this is our social revolution?
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The wars for the freedoms we take for granted were fought long ago. Today, they’re going through the motions, but really do not know shit about drastic social change. And why should they? After all, no modern revolution manual can be googled. The Communist Manifesto says nothing of Twitter feed. And many of their peers are still waiting for someone to sound the horn and let them know that now is the time for action.
Who is holding up the revolution? When discussing lack of revolutionary experience, it’s hard not to point out the overindulged, white American male. Look back a few generations and we find women and African Americans at the forefront of their movements to ignite social change. The current generation might not be able to revolt their way out of a paper bag, but that fight is still in their blood. The messages coming from the Occupy Wall Street crowd are neutral by gender and race, so is it unfair then to blame the most pampered of the group? Favored throughout history, it can be said that white males have the most to learn about the uprising of the underdog.
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So, what does it take to light a fire under the asses of our recently disadvantaged youth? Weidner points out that there is no doubt they are suffering from the state of our economy, “… joblessness runs between 10% and 23% for workers under 25 years old.” College loans won’t disappear, bills pile up, hope dwindles, and there doesn’t seem to be a single soul in power fighting for their future.
Is there a learning curve for social revolution and could Occupy Wall Street simply be the steam before the pot boils over? For the sake of the would-be revolutionaries, let’s hope that Occupy Wall Street is a practice run. They have the tools and they’re slowly figuring out how to use them. The framework to organize and grow numbers through social networks has been built and proven around the world. That soapbox can remain on standby while our American youth takes a crash course in provoking social change. They’re finally realizing that the future is theirs to fight for, not inherit.
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Photo – david_shankbone/Flickr
About Nikki Arena
I think you wrote this too soon…like maybe a week ago? There’s a world of difference between what Occupy Wall Street was last week and what it is this week…the complaints about it being too small and unfocused and getting barely any media coverage already sound dated.
Although there has been progress in the past week of Occupy Wall Street, to say that OWS is now organized and has a unified message capable of actually shifting our social course is taking a massive leap. And the media coverage is a fraction of what it needs to be. A french fry that looks like Jesus has received more coverage than this demonstration.
The lack of revolutionary spirit is still a valid point, though. Americans, particularly young Americans, seem content to express their outrage and dissatistfaction by posting online, rather than organizing. It may be that the visible failure of the anti-Iraq invasion protests helped solidify the understanding that “taking to the streets” no longer accomplishes anything.
But what’s the alternative?
(As well as the WTO protests in Seattle, which got plenty of coverage but still didn’t change anything.)
Skeptical historian here. I hope we’re not comparing today’s youth with a non-existent golden age when America’s young people were on the vanguard of revolution.
I’m not sure the youth have ever been very decisive in terms of big social movements in the U.S., contrary to the great myths of the 1960’s. It really wasn’t the college kids who got the U.S. out of Viet Nam. Young people served as footsoldiers in the civil rights lunch-counter sit-ins, but there were many more people who were Rosa Parks’ age. But, there’s a lot of retroactive Baby Boom self-congratulation out there, as if listening to the right kind of music and smoking the right substances is what brings down The Man. It was middle class and working class adults who had the biggest weight in getting behind the civil rights and antiwar movements. LBJ cared a lot more about what Walter Cronkite was saying than he did what kids were saying.
(Of course, it’s not until the 20th century that there even exists something called “youth culture” or “America’s youth,” so it’s a pretty small sample size anyway.)
For centuries every generation complains that the young people of that era are too spoiled, not active enough, they don’t care enough, they’re too complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, etc. I guarantee you young people today will grow up to say the exact same things about their younger generation.
We’ve been mass-producing cookie-cutter high school degrees, telling young people to stay in school and be successful in the ways that we have defined success, stay out of trouble, and don’t do anything that could hurt your application to a good school or that looks bad on a resume. (Like, for example, a criminal record for unlawful assembly or disturbing the peace.) And now we also expect them in their loads of spare time to get out there and smash the system? Or throw around all that money that young people are making so much of?
“Get a job, and by the way, why aren’t you leading a revolution somewhere?”
wellokscott,
That is the exact point. The piece above is comparing young Americans with youth that is leading revolution in countries around the world in order to attain basic freedoms. Freedom that we haven’t had to fight for since the birth of the country. Pointing out the movements for women and African Americans is simply to recognize that those groups have had something to fight for more recently than the American Revolutionary War.
It has nothing to do with laziness, being spoiled, or not caring. It has something to do with never having to alter your future by campaigning for major social change. The majority of us take it for granted. We often to look to the young because, as a whole, they tend to be less in denial about what is going on in this country. Less willing to suck it up and just hope that things will change. Less likely to stay at a job over worked and under paid because they have a family to support and have already seen so many of their peers laid off. And more hope that their voice can actually change anything. We can delve into all of the reasons we are not seeing revolution from other demographics in our society, but that would be another focus for a different piece.
“Get a job, and by the way, why aren’t you leading a revolution somewhere?” …. I think it’s more like “Get a job OR go lead a revolution. Don’t just complain about your situation, do something about it.” And I think that we can say this about everyone, not just 20 somethings.
“We’ve been mass-producing cookie-cutter high school degrees….” — This is a very good point that is worth recognizing. We never talk about the ideals and the rules that have been placed on the young and how that has put them at even more of a disadvantage when it comes to rising up against the grain. Maybe we are being too hard on them. Maybe OWS is not getting as much credit as it deserves as the start of a true revolution. But, then again, when the title of the discussion is “Is American Youth too Coddled to Revolt?” and we spend the bulk of our time discussing reasons why we’re expecting too much from our youth, maybe we’ve answered that question.
You raise a great point about comparing the news coverage of American youth and news coverage of youth overseas. There seems to be a lot of young people in the Middle East helping to bring down governments, being the footsoldiers in revolutions, etc.
I think a key difference is the demographics of the U.S. versus places like Libya and Egypt. In poorer parts of the world, people under the age of 25 make up a huge portion of the population. Those countries’ age distribution is like a wide pyramid, while in the U.S. it’s more like a totem pole. The under-25’s in the U.S. are vastly outnumbered by older folks who are pretty well invested in the system, while in the Middle East the under-25’s outnumber everyone else. And, politically, many of those young people overseas are fighting for the chance to vote and for the right to protest in the first place. I guarantee once you have young people growing up in a democracy, they’ll start to slack off and take their rights for granted just like we do.
I’m not trying to make excuses or say that everything in the U.S. is just fine. I just think being 18 in the Middle East is not necessarily all that similar to being 18 in suburban America.
“The under-25’s in the U.S. are vastly outnumbered by older folks who are pretty well invested in the system, while in the Middle East the under-25’s outnumber everyone else. And, politically, many of those young people overseas are fighting for the chance to vote and for the right to protest in the first place. ”
You hit the nail on the head with this comment. Great observation, couldn’t agree more.
When students began to default on their loans en masse the public called us spoiled and said we shouldn’t have bought that laptop/car/ipod with our loan money. I looked around my efficiency apartment with not so much as a radio to my name and wondered why the nation was throwing stones at the generation it told to go to college at any and all costs.
I definitely think there’s a learned helplessness among the -35 group. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. The economy right now is discussed like this voracious monster and if you don’t work with it there’s this sense that you’ll be destroyed and the monster will just keep on going. The young adult generation isn’t too lazy to fight, it’s terrified of being crushed underfoot.
Typical. We old folks want the young folks on the front lines doing the grunt work, marching and protesting and all that stuff they’re supposed to be good at. Easy for me to tsk-tsk them sitting here on my work computer in my office. Why can’t those damn lazy young people get off their asses and do those things that I’m too complacent and lazy to do myself??
Reminds me of what people tell me when I say I don’t want to have kids: “your kid could grow up to cure cancer one day.” To that I say, “why aren’t YOU working to cure cancer instead of leaving it to the next generation?”