In Defense of American Youth

“You don’t know who America fought in the War of 1812? How could you not know that??” My brother says this rather dramatically to our youngest sister, still in high school, who is impeccably dressed and a bit shy around his domineering personality. She failed to answer the Cranium question correctly. “You are so dumb.” After watching her shift in her seat to hide her embarrassment, I shoot him a disapproving glance and shake my head, offering her a reassuring smile. I know what he is thinking. Typical oblivious teenager. All she cares about is her clothes, purses, shoes. She knows nothing about the world. My brother actually takes pleasure in vocalizing his opinion of her, trying to rouse her to a fight with his performance of disgust. He usually concludes by asking her, as if to prove his own hunches correct, “So what the hell are you going to do with your life anyway, be a fashion designer?”

I scold my brother in private for his insensitivity, for my opinion is that even if she does have some “misplaced priorities” (like those resulting in academic probation, for example), his critique-by-insult approach is less than inspiring. But the thing is, my brother doesn’t even know my sister. He has no idea what she does know, what she cares about and thinks about. He has no idea that she asks me, sensibly considered the safer resource, questions like, “If conservative republicans believe in smaller government and liberal democrats believe in bigger government, why are the republicans the ones against gays and abortion?” And, amidst the reports of the growing war bill, “Wait, isn’t Bush supposed to be a fiscal conservative or whatever?” And my personal favorite, when she is frustrated with her caddy friends, “I know this is all stupid drama but I am still in high school so I should be allowed to complain about it because I’m really mad.”

My sympathies thus unmasked, it should be no surprise that I find the angry critiques of today’s youth unnerving and misguided. Our young generation has become the scapegoats for cultural critics everywhere. In Europe, their backpacking behavior and misguided sense of history results in their being labeled over-privileged, ignorant fools. In the Middle East, they are seen as indulgent libertines, a threat to religious and cultural purity. In their own country, they are chastised for their apathy, mocked for their naïveté and condemned for their partying. We want to blame them for the seeming breakdown of traditional values and sociability, for the slowed progression of our national output, even for the spread of disease and crime and violence.
It is no secret that our generation has very real faults. But we as a society need to see these shortcomings for what they are: largely, a result of our own actions and of the cultural shifts that have taken place. Generation Y has had to deal with a myriad of cultural changes taking root faster than any other string of changes in history, huge and unexpected changes from which people (yea, adults even) across the world are still reeling. American youth possess the financial status to enjoy the technological changes and the social status to enjoy the cultural changes, and are the most visible in the global media of television and film. Therefore, they are essentially the guinea pigs of a massive global experiment: what happens when human beings have large amounts of wealth, small amounts of family and community, virtually unlimited technological resources and interfaces to mediate contact with one another, and perhaps most importantly, when they have their myths and social structures theorized out of existence? It is no wonder many are crippled by confusion.

In contrast to the problems facing today’s youth, the identity crisis of the sixties was more straight-forward, more contained; it was essentially culture and counter-culture, a young generation rebelling against its parents, literally and figuratively. The parent was conformity, strict cultural and sexual mores, and the self-righteous yet previously successful foreign policy of the past. The child was truly individualistic, questioning boundaries of sex, race, and class, and in this new inclusionary ethos, skeptical of violence and war.

This generation, then, took to the streets against a well-defined enemy. Racism was codified in the law, Vietnam was a very obvious disaster, and the suburbs were a rather disturbing reflection of singularity. Moreover, their grassroots efforts, such as the civil rights movements and the war protests, were actually successful in effecting change. These massive popular successes lent credibility to the democratic process and fueled a confidence and unity that sustained that activism throughout the decade. This generation, instead of undermining American society, was in many ways the full realization of it. That is, the youth of the sixties actually brought to life ideals like the Declaration of equal creation and mutual tolerance, the rugged individualism and American dream. The America of our imaginations, in all its diversity and potential, was shaken out of its rhetorical mold.

The new generation, on the other hand, must deal with a world that is much more fractured, in terms of both its politics and its identity. On a philosophical level, the unifying myths of America, freedom, and progress have been destroyed. Revisionist history took the heroics out of the establishment of the nation and its security, exposing it for the complicated combination of evils and ideals that it was and is. Perhaps following Jacques Derrida’s lead, who exposed all of our ideas about ourselves and our world as our own creations, we have taken apart traditional identity categories such as gender, race, and nationality to make room for hybridity and sexual freedom and exploration. But in doing so, we have left a complicated maze of categorical terms in which many find themselves overwhelmed and lost. Even ideas about American potential, class mobility, and the American dream broke down as the cycle of poverty worsened and children struggled more, not less, than their parents. Instead of a clear-cut, evil enemy army, we now fight an ambiguous idea of terror, a loose brand of insurgents living amongst our friends in the hostile land. Deconstructing all of our stabilizing ideology is at once infinitely liberating and infinitely overwhelming.

The radical changes that the new generation faces are material as well as theoretical of course. Technological innovation is increasing exponentially, rapidly changing the way people live, and importantly, how they communicate. Because of the internet, cell phones, video messaging and the like, American youth have never had to make a faulty friendship work with their neighbor, because they have full communication and unlimited access to someone cooler that lives twenty minutes away. Things like chat rooms encourage anonymity and preclude accountability. One can have the benefits of companionship, like conversation and entertainment, without commitment or sincerity. There is actually less unity in these interfaces, though they profess more. Furthermore, our wealth has increased our mobility; we travel all over the world and encourage people to live in different cities for short periods of time in the interest of self-expansion. But these short stints have led to the breakdown of communities, enabling people to slip between the social cracks into depression, loneliness, and recklessness. Weakening our ties to each other unsurprisingly results in an increase of apathy. In terms of unity and activism, it is much harder to organize a protest amongst people one has never even seen. These are consequences that we did not foresee when we thought we were positively improving the lines of communication between people.

The final charge I have room to address is the laziness that seems to plague young people, and their concern with the trappings of pop culture instead of their education, their jobs, or developing skills. But we must realize that our own wealth and policies have created the conditions for this laziness to grow. We have an immigration policy that allows millions of foreign immigrants to suffer in the most menial jobs while our young people have enough of their parents’ money to avoid the job market all together. There is an abundant exploitable labor force that actually is doing the hard work of our young people, a fact that is crippling them daily when they are asked to do simple things like change a tire or clean a bathroom. Many young people never even had to clean their own rooms because their parents hired someone for that. Parents followed their natural inclinations to share their wealth with their children, and created a quality of life and sense of entitlement unheard of before. Can we really expect those youth to reject that generous hand in the name of hard work?

Moreover, our own media, run by the adults, not the children, generates countless images of opulent people and almost none of the work it takes to generate that wealth, misleading a generation of young people who, for various reasons not limited to broken families and single parent homes, were essentially raised by this very media. And if that wealth and financial freedom is the visible and desirable standard, even young people from outside of that class develop those values by association. I recently heard a young friend of mine from a middle class background tell her mother that she refused to use a payphone because it would make her look poor.

All of this confusion no doubt leads to distractions and fantasies. Our young generation is mesmerized by the displays of wealth they see in magazines, and having no practical idea about how to achieve that wealth, they find entertainment value. When technology brings everything to their fingertips with the click of a mouse, its no wonder they are not accustomed to walking to the store. And when we have bred such laziness and created such absurd conveniences, can we blame them for not knowing history? This is the first generation coming of age in a post-modern, post-feminism, “global” world and dealing with the consequences of new forms of communication and relationships. If they are confused and seek escape in the form of parties, they do so with the historical guidance of the drug culture of the sixties. They are playing with and learning their toys, still new and symbolic to them, but they are reaching out. They are trying to understand their ethnic identities, sexual identities, and political ideals amidst far more choices than were ever available before, and this understandably takes more time, but they are trying. They will recover; the world will demand it. They must certainly take responsibility for their faults, but we must take some responsibility too.