Actively Hating Apathy, Part I
I read an article in today's Cornell Daily Sun that 44% of the respondents in a recent poll of Americans regarding their views on different issues pertaining to civil rights in the post-9/11 era were in favor of "restricting the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans." How would you expect a reasonable person to react to such news: with outrage, disgust, fear, or a determination to do something about it before some hypothetical fool, perhaps a neo-con wonk assistant to the National Security Adviser, who has always believed our country's A-rab population ought to be kept safely in their place, manages to bring the poll's results to the President's attention? Perhaps, if the reasonable person whose reaction concerns us isn't an university student. If you take me as a representative example, an university student reading the poll merely feels a brief twist in his guts, which passes in the time it takes him to wonder where they put the crossword puzzle today. Soon, even before he's given up on the crossword, it's time to go to class.
I'm enough of a strange fish that perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to proffer my own story as a representative example of the American student's way of living, but when it comes to his level of political interest, I think that the relevant details of my daily life prove damned near the middle of the bell curve. Study after study shows that Americans in my age group are the most politically apathetic generation of American youth in history: we'd rather watch TV than vote. They said so on The West Wing, after all, right before those Nazi punks tried to murder President Bartlett.
Come to think of it, those Nazis were the most politically active youth in the whole episode.
That little irony isn't too far off the mark, if at all, in describing the state of my generation of Americans. The only ones of us who seem to give a damn about anything are the clean shorn neo-Hitler Youth and scraggly-haired and -bearded enviro-anarchists. Not even Fox News would mistake these gangs of idiots, throwing their wayward souls into annihilating enemies on the fringe of the body politic's consciousness, for a real youth-driven political movement.
Can anyone point to the cause of this mess? People who buy into the Hunter S. Thompson view of American political history argue that the last such movement was killed in two stages: first by Bobby Kennedy getting shot, and finally by Richard Nixon getting elected, then re-elected - by a landslide, no less - while running against a Democrat who based his primary campaign on galvanizing the Youth Vote and then turned his back on it during the general election, making a mad dash back to the Party establishment that was responsible for alienating The Youth in the first place - back in 1968 - when the main Party burgher ordered the Chicago riot police to crush The Youth in the streets.
It's at the very least a plausible scenario: The Youth were stunned, then shot at, then betrayed, then crushed, and so they just stopped giving a shit. They stopped thinking that it was cool to care about who and/or what runs the government, and so their little brothers and sisters never got a chance to think that being political was cool. They started doing coke and listened to overproduced, soulless garbage that masqueraded for music. Eventually they embraced the Star Wars aesthetic as their preferred mode of dramatic representation. Not long after that, they bought BMWs and voted for Ronald Reagan, twice. They discarded their idea of a nation's greatness as measured by the quality of the lives of its least fortunate members and decided that how well you could do for yourself had to be more important (Who could blame them? Look where giving a shit about other people got them when they were The Youth). Pretty soon their kids started to grow up watching the MTV whose programming choices were all made by their parents' old friends.
And those kids grew up to be my peers, and I gave up trying to change their minds and just bitched about them.
I actually don't agree with all of that argument, but I've got to go play pool now. I'll finish this up later.
I'm enough of a strange fish that perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to proffer my own story as a representative example of the American student's way of living, but when it comes to his level of political interest, I think that the relevant details of my daily life prove damned near the middle of the bell curve. Study after study shows that Americans in my age group are the most politically apathetic generation of American youth in history: we'd rather watch TV than vote. They said so on The West Wing, after all, right before those Nazi punks tried to murder President Bartlett.
Come to think of it, those Nazis were the most politically active youth in the whole episode.
That little irony isn't too far off the mark, if at all, in describing the state of my generation of Americans. The only ones of us who seem to give a damn about anything are the clean shorn neo-Hitler Youth and scraggly-haired and -bearded enviro-anarchists. Not even Fox News would mistake these gangs of idiots, throwing their wayward souls into annihilating enemies on the fringe of the body politic's consciousness, for a real youth-driven political movement.
Can anyone point to the cause of this mess? People who buy into the Hunter S. Thompson view of American political history argue that the last such movement was killed in two stages: first by Bobby Kennedy getting shot, and finally by Richard Nixon getting elected, then re-elected - by a landslide, no less - while running against a Democrat who based his primary campaign on galvanizing the Youth Vote and then turned his back on it during the general election, making a mad dash back to the Party establishment that was responsible for alienating The Youth in the first place - back in 1968 - when the main Party burgher ordered the Chicago riot police to crush The Youth in the streets.
It's at the very least a plausible scenario: The Youth were stunned, then shot at, then betrayed, then crushed, and so they just stopped giving a shit. They stopped thinking that it was cool to care about who and/or what runs the government, and so their little brothers and sisters never got a chance to think that being political was cool. They started doing coke and listened to overproduced, soulless garbage that masqueraded for music. Eventually they embraced the Star Wars aesthetic as their preferred mode of dramatic representation. Not long after that, they bought BMWs and voted for Ronald Reagan, twice. They discarded their idea of a nation's greatness as measured by the quality of the lives of its least fortunate members and decided that how well you could do for yourself had to be more important (Who could blame them? Look where giving a shit about other people got them when they were The Youth). Pretty soon their kids started to grow up watching the MTV whose programming choices were all made by their parents' old friends.
And those kids grew up to be my peers, and I gave up trying to change their minds and just bitched about them.
I actually don't agree with all of that argument, but I've got to go play pool now. I'll finish this up later.
posted by Dr. Chuck | 6:11 PM
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