Young People Lead the Way in Volunteerism
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High enrollment for The Peace Corps and Teach For America are belying the notion the youth are unmotivated or lazy. Here Peace Corps volunteers in Burkina Faso discuss food security.
For all the talk about the emerging clash of civilizations, there is another deeply unsettling narrative permeating the op-ed sphere: while police-separated mobs on each side of the Muslim culture debate hunker down by Park51, a clash of generations is steadily emerging too, and it may be a case more intractable than the battle to affirm Islam’s legitimacy in western countries.
Young people have already been on the receiving end of a barrage of insults by Fortune and David Brooks. Thomas Friedman is another belligerent in the clash of generations. He wrote an op-ed for the New York Times excoriating the youth, calling our, my, generation intellectually chaste, unmotivated, and too easily influenced by big money. He cites a 2008 survey of public high school teachers that indicates 21 percent view student absenteeism as a serious problem, and 29 percent of the educators acknowledge student apathy. That survey was also referenced by the Washington Post’s economics columnist Robert Samuelson, who says of school performance:
‘The unstated assumption of much school “reform” is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.’ Wrong, he says. ‘Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well.’
But Friedman, always guilty of taking a parenthetical and applying it wholesale on a much larger scale, considers Samuelson’s observation as a “microcosm of a larger problem”: America has suffered a values breakdown, fueled by get rich schemes and “something-for-nothingism.”
Some of his more tendentious observations include:
Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.”
The Depression was caused by asset bubbles, high income disparity, and a federal government afraid of its own shadow. Sound familiar? In its aftermath, safeguards were put in place to avoid bank runs, offer Americans a modicum of social security, and as Paul Krugman explains in his 2007 book, The Conscience of a Liberal, an eviscerated super-rich upper class couldn’t stop the avalanche that swept away extreme wealth. Their tax rate went from 63 percent to 92 percent in the two decades following the depression.
The political right was stripped of legitimacy long enough for sweeping economic changes to be carried out, and Eisenhower’s presidency kept most of the New Deal provisions intact, making peace with social democracy.
Look at polls today to gauge how much of the progressive movement amenable to similar sweeping reforms is populated by the youth: we are a progressive bunch, certainly. The preceding generation, not the current one, is stonewalling solutions and advancement. Old white men and grizzly mamas are holding the youth hostage with tired ideas inimical to our future.
Next, the transformation of American industry to help defeat the Axis Powers in World War II is hardly a model for my generation. We would like to avoid mass murder on a continental scale, and if the American ethos requires twelve years of gutted savings, high unemployment, and the ubiquitous soup line, and another four years of total and indiscriminate warfare to shatter faith in the laissez-faire, get-rich-by-snake-oil model, then maybe we need to re-evaluate American Exceptionalism.
And even if we marvel over that era from 1947-1975 of upward mobility America experienced (which included the penetration of unions keeping wages viable and managers honest), African Americans and women were still second-class citizens. Ancient Athens was a pretty good democracy too. They had a kleroterion; it got stuff done by the people, for the people. Slaves and women weren’t included. African Americans can vote today. Unmarried, childless women in 2010 aged below thirty earn more than similarly aged men. In the period Friedman suggests we had it good, that wasn’t a possibility.
My generation is leading itself quite nicely. Enrollment in the Peace Corps — John F. Kennedy’s call to service — is high. In the age of Reagan, enrollment was at its lowest. Teach For America, commonly referred to as this generation’s Peace Corps, is seeing enrollment jump too. It is more than a little profound that the contemporary model of ‘60s promise and service is on a high just as the original is seeing a revival.
My generation cares about the environment as much as we care about good governance, and our younger peers are travelling abroad in record numbers. We’re doing the best we can to keep civil liberties from eroding by the hands of the righteous, as our support for the Park51 complex indicates, and as our support for gay marriage in 2004 — that year’s right-wing culture war, indicated.
If anything, Friedman, as a representative of the preceding generation, should be apologizing to us for making it so hard to keep our heads above water.
Last time I checked, the film Wall Street reflected the values of his age group, and Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” was a song about his cohort, not ours.
Mikhail Zinshteyn is a staff writer for Campus Progress. You can e-mail him at mzinshteyn@googlemail.com.
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