Where Are All The Kids At?

Today’s Comment of The Day is at Hullabaloo and is a somewhat testy response to a post by Poputanian and subsequent commenters’ wondering what it will take to get today’s youth to rebel:

what kind of youth movement would satisfy you sanctimonious boomers? how would you like us to express our outrage? we live with a terrible future hanging over our heads, where we will be paying for YOUR social security, YOUR healthcare, and THIS FUCKING WAR! adults have spent nearly three decades consolidating their own wealth and now kids are supposed to feel guilty for not being able to stop an illegal war that the entire world couldn’t stand in the way of???

in 2004, voters below 30 were the ONLY age group in the nation that voted for Kerry. i firmly believe that before you can start telling us about political activism, you should straighten out your own fucking generation.
Utica | 01.20.07 – 12:18 am | #

Go Utica! God, how I loathe boomers and I’m not even a kid.

I was born in 1959 which makes me an in-betweenie; neither Boomer nor Gen X. We’re not hippies: we’re the generation of disco and punk, the generation that were left no crumbs to scrabble for once the entitled generation their greedy mitts on the money and the levers of power. Once elected, for the boomers it was ‘get all you can and after that pull up the ladder’.

They had free schools and universities, the NHS, riches through property and the welfare state: we got unemployment, a housing shortage, double-digit inflation, insane rightwing government, death squads, drugs and the threat of nuclear war. And now Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush. And for our own children it looks to be even worse.

Cheers, boomers.

The Watergate and Vietnam scandals that they harp on about so much happened when we were in our early teens; mostly, to us it was all so much background noise – and it’s not as though they got the rightwing out, anyhow. The movement was a failure.

No, the defining political events of our times were Iran-Contra, mutually assured destruction and the death squads and the cynicism of those times has informed our politics for ever. As a result, we’ve never trusted anyone in politics and we’ve taught our kids to do the same – so is it any wonder they don’t want to be politically involved in the formal channels provided, when it’s plain for anyone to see that the existing political institutions are so irredeemably corrupt?

There is an assumption made (t’s common wisdom now, it’s been repeated so often) – that leftists are dirty hippies. No, no and again no.

Our rebellion started in the eighties, against Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet, to whose rightist legacy Bush et al are the heirs. We created our own political space by being early adopers of technology – we were posting to listservs, bulletin boards and usenet and chatting via IRC before the web was even a glint in anyone’s eye.

I feel so sorry for my children’s generation – not only are they expected to be well-rounded individuals, successful in their careers and in their personal lives, but they’re expected to also somehow sort out the mess their grandparents have made of the world – to clean up Washington, solve global warming, rescue the environment – as though there’s some sort of generational magic wand that would wipe the slate clean, if only those damned kids would take their attention away from MySpace and show some gumption for once.

For one thing, why the hell should they? They didn’t break it, why should they be expected to fix it? They’ve got enough to do just surviving.No, fuck that, let the boomers clean up their own messes.

Secondly, it’s all very well for bloggers of a certain age to pontificate to the young for their inaction – but who is it on the barricades at G8 protests, blocking the gates at Faslane nuclear base, pie-ing politicians or putting their lives on the line by lying in front of bulldozers in Palestine? Who is it that’s the mainstay of the antiwar movement? It’s not middle-aged bloggers continually harking back to the sixties.

My sons’ generation, those in their teens and twenties now, are taking the use of technology for political purposes much further than we could ever have concieved of. Just because young people don’t choose the political channels the boomers choose and the boomers can’t see them doing it, doesn’t mean they’re not political, or active.

Perhaps those complaining about political inactivity and apathy on the part of the young should stop reading the likes of ageing fake-liberal HuffPo and Salon and take a look at the Social Forum movement or Globalise Resistance or Schnews, or Indymedia. That’s where the kids are: they want to change the system, not just become more vote-fodder for the existing parties.

Get over yourselves, boomers. You are not the sine qua non of political activism to whom all later activists must genuflect – those days are long gone and so have those outdated modes of protest.

What the younger generation is looking for from you is active leadership and support, not envious blog-criticism.