NEW YORK—David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times is a good reminder of why he’s more than just the paper’s token conservative. Brooks argues that Edward Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama underlines something that both the pre- and post-boomer generations have in common: a shared sense of service and community, values that seem to have skipped the generation in between. (Or at least, the values of a certain couple that conservatives don’t like very much.)

It’s tempting to read Brooks’s argument as yet another right-wing writer insisting that the Clintons are selfish people. But beneath that, he registers an aspirational account of the younger generation, an account notably free of qualification or skepticism. “The respect for institutions that was prevalent during the early ’60s is prevalent with the young today,” Brooks writes. “The earnest industriousness that was common then is back today. The awareness that we are not self-made individualists, free to be you and me, but emerge as parts of networks, webs and communities; that awareness is back again today.”

Generalizations like this drive social scientists nuts, as they should. But it seems Brooks isn’t making a descriptive observation, so much as an aspirational one — highlighting trends that exist, at some level, and might still be strengthened, to the point that they become the traits by which our generation is remembered. I say our generation, because there’s nothing to prevent twenty- and thirty-somethings in Canada from aspiring to the same sense of service and community that Brooks sees gathering in the U.S. The question is what would catalyze that change, and what shape that change would take.

It’s probably facile to suggest that Canada needs a young, game-changing politician of our own to provide that catalyst. With one obvious exception, that’s not how our country works, nor should it be. Moreover, any serious challenge to the status quo in Ottawa today would almost certainly find willing and eager opponents in provincial capitals, out of habit if nothing else. If our generation wanted to distinguish itself from our parents, to embody some of the selflessness that Brooks describes, we would probably need to get on with it ourselves, then wait for political office-seekers to notice the trend.

For example? On the weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote from Davos that social entrepreneurs of our generation are the “21st-century answer to the student protesters of the 1960s.” He cites online organizations like Orphans Against Aids (which pays for children orphaned by AIDS to attend school), United For Sight (which collects donated eyeglasses and ships them to poor countries), and Teach For America (which organizes middle-class American university graduates to teach in under-serviced schools).

Each of these groups was founded by American college students, and while I don’t know many similar Canadian success stories, I’m going to assume they exist and we just don’t talk about them enough. Which is a shame, because I’d like to believe that my generation of Canadians is every bit as service-minded and altruistic as the young Americans David Brooks puts his faith in.

So here’s an open invitation: if you know of any organizations that exemplify the sort of commitment and service that deserves attention, tell me and I will give it all the modest attention this blog can muster. I’m tired of reading about the promise of the next generation only in the New York Times.

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Posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 3:12 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.