Just when it seemed like nothing more of interest could possibly be written about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, New York magazine comes out with a surprisingly engaging look at their respective political activism in law school — Clinton fighting for civil rights in the early ’70s at Yale, Obama caught up in the affirmative action debates of the late ’80s at Harvard. The article is focused on the two candidates’ early lessons in politics, but I read a more pressing question: what happened to student activism? If every generation is defined by the cause it fought for, what’s ours? And if you can’t answer that question right away, what does it tell you?
Last week, the Times’ Thomas Friedman called the current crop of students “Generation Q.” The Q is for quiet — quiet in the face of quickening climate change, a madcap federal budget deficit, and Social Security reform that can either be uncomfortable or excruciating, depending on how long Americans wait to get on with it.
To this list he might have added a health care system that is outperformed by almost every other Western industrialized nation, urban infrastructure that is literally falling apart, the growing income gap, and other sources of outrage and civil disobedience. At least, these things seem like they might have caused outrage when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were students. Today, says Friedman, people do online petitions.
Friedman’s piece met with some pushback from college activists. One disputed Friedman’s charge of too much virtual activism by listing some of the activist Web sites he was involved with. Another wrote, “Mr. Friedman may not see Facebook as a ‘substitute’ for his generation’s tactics, but my generation needs to see the potential in creative, nuanced and unseen ways of getting our voices heard.”
That might have been a compelling argument four years ago, when genuinely innovative online organizing helped Democrats raise more money and deploy more volunteers than perhaps ever before in the history of the party. Just one problem: they still lost the election, to the worst president in living memory, in the middle of a war that was going badly, in an economy that was shedding jobs. So much for the power of the online American generation.
But at least they’re trying. In Canada, the twentysomething generation has no comparable project to boast of; no bold effort, successful or not, to make a mark on the political landscape.
It’s not for lack of a stirring cause. Under the current government, Canada’s fight against climate change has been reduced to capitulation in fact if not in name — the more so after yesterday’s throne speech. If a Democrat becomes president next year, we may very well find ourselves last in the developed world on ecological responsibility. Canadians under thirty — my generation — will be left to deal with the havoc this causes. But the streets are not flush with protesters, the university campuses are not roiling in dissent, the Internet is not throbbing with Canadian versions of MoveOn.org.
Patton told his troops, on their way to Germany, “You can thank God that twenty years from now when you’re sitting by the fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what you did in the war, you won’t have to shift him to the other knee, cough and say, ‘I shoveled crap in Louisiana.’” As the youngest generation of Canadian voters, the fight against climate change is very much our fight. But it’s being fought by Europeans, and increasingly by Americans, on our behalf. And the only thing we’re shoveling is the idea that somebody else will let us off the hook.
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
Mark: It’s not just in Canada, it seems all over artists don’t get the local recogtnition they should. I was in Malaga where Picasso was born and it is much different, but then he is...
Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
Jefry: I do not really like to read a story like a novel or a real story but I think this is very interesting and need to be read
Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
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