Dear Generation Disaffected:

Rinku Sen

Dear Generation Disaffected:

Recently, I took one of our young interns out for lunch. His program requires a mentor, and I was it. I asked what his plans were after he wrapped up with us. He replied with some business about tending bar in Berlin. “I feel disaffected,” he said. “Nothing I see out there seems like its actually going to work.” None of the work available to him, particularly in the non-profit world, seemed likely to produce the kind of radical transformation he sought. My young colleague is talented, smart and quite hard working. He looked sad telling me that he couldn’t find a place to contribute, and I was sad too — for him and for us.

First, I developed a rational analysis, looking for historical and contextual reasons for this generation’s cynicism. When I was coming into politics in the mid-1980’s, we were 10 years closer to the Civil Rights Movement, cities were just beginning to elect their first mayors of color, and, although there was a lot of grumbling about affirmative action and multicultural education, the attack on “political correctness” hadn’t yet gained traction.

We actually felt hopeful, even though there was so little political activity that ours was called the “Me Generation.”

Twenty-four years later, the limitations of those victories are increasingly clear. We’ve lost affirmative action in four states (and counting), some of our mayors have turned out to be either corrupt or simply ineffective, and legal decisions have gutted many of our civil rights laws. Maybe young people can be forgiven for wondering if this is the best we can do.

But that’s not the whole answer. It’s also just easier to be disaffected than to engage, easier to critique than to construct. Engaging means that much of the time, we scramble trying to figure out the right thing to do; we settle for less than what we really want and need; we fight each other over credit and “space” rather than conservatives over policies and programs. My intern can come off blustery and entitled, but what I mostly felt from him was a deep desire to belong to something that could make him proud, and, if he couldn’t, to protect himself from that reality. I think he feels this way because somehow his heart knows there’s less pain in it.

But there’s also less joy. What I remember the most about my early political work was how intensely fun it was, and what a relief it was to be connected to something beyond me. We cried over plenty of less-than-satisfying wins, but at least we did it together. What we learned is now reflected in the places where new ideas are taking root – in the growth of the green economies movement, in the rush of immigrant marchers calling for legalization, and in the huge numbers of people engaging in this election cycle. These aren’t perfect political moments, but they’re our political moments, and I’m excited about them. It’s hard to give “lessons learned” the same importance as “victories won,” yet learning is the very thing that makes victory possible. Still, everyone has the right to learn what they want to learn, not what I think they should learn. My colleague and I both feel the urgent need to create new models and strategies. I’ll look forward to hearing his ideas. I guess we’ll be doing that over a beer.

Posted at 9:14 AM, Apr 15, 2008 in Youth | Permalink | View Comments

Comments

I have to disagree with much of this post. My entire response can be found here, but here is a highlight:

Sen claims little responsibility for what he ascribes to be disaffection. In fact, he even says, "[My intern's] program requires a mentor, and I was it." It's an attitude of reluctance. In fact, until recently, progressives have been largely unwilling to pay much attention to young people. Thanks to "Generation Me" of which Sen is a part, young people have mostly gotten to where they are today without any real form of mentorship at any real level.

rinku,
i agree with you on one end: that the non profit world isn't luring in young people like it used to. however, i see it mostly as a problem with the movement, not young folks. it's become such a privileged and --sometimes --co-opted space that youth who are passionate and engaged have a hard time imagining themselves in it. this is particularly true for working class youth of color who have a hard time finding their realities in statistics, books, etc.

i think as a movement we really need to challenge ourselves to ask the tough questions: why are so many people left out? whose voices aren't being heard, and why?

as a member of 'generation disaffected', i disagree with many of the underlying assumptions of your post. but thanks for starting the discussion, because we need it.

I agree with much of what you said but I feel your viewpoint is limited. It seems that you did a tour in college and,from that perspective, relied on the university to act as a bearer of social change. I say the university because it was from this institution that the gains made from the civil rights movement were most visible. Educated people of color were for the first time finding positions within the middle class apparatus. Yet, the very fact people of color and Women were in these positions posed a contradiction within the system. The system wasn't created to allow women and POC the opportunity to access the type of lifestyle white middle class men could attain. It has always worked for a minority of people and not worked for the majority . The civil rights movement challenged the structure to gain access to it and not to destroy it. Thats why I agree with you. But outside of that, you make no attempt to recognize that Neoliberalism did not work, Capitalism is on its last leg, and people want some kind of change. I say the world looks ready for the change you experienced in the 80s.

I have to agree with the previous commenter that much of this post is off-base. Ms. Sen bases her view on a single anecdote, but that anecdote is very much unrepresentative of the attitudes of the Millennial Generation.

As documented by the nonpartisan Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), as well as the new books Youth to Power: How Today's Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow's Progressive Majority (of which I am the author), and Millenial Makeover: YouTube, MysSpace, and the Future of American Politics, Millennials are anything but uninvolved, cynical and disaffected. These are traits more properly associated with Generation X.

Millennials today are optimistic, heavily involved in politics and in their community, and driving much innovation in the progressive movement today in fields as diverse as electoral politics, human rights (Darfur, Tibet), and Climate Change.

Dear Generation Not Watching or Listening,

I think we can agree on one thing, your intern feels disaffected. And you know what, we could probably agree on two things ... it isn't very fair to draw a broad conclusion about a group largely based on one interaction with one person ... especially in the face of a mountain of information to the contrary.

The Millenial generation is far from disengaged, and there are myriad resources out there to show how hugely active the younger set is right now. Young people are fighting for their communities, are paying attention to politics, are voting in record numbers, are generously giving their time to community service, and are talking to their friends and familes about all of it. Not only do I know this because I am young, but I know it because it has been well documented and researched.

There is some good reading out there - and you'll soon realize that the ME generation thinks a lot more about WE than you give them credit and is very different than their older brother's and sisters were a decade ago.

Here are some good places to get started:

Rock the Vote Research - http://rockthevote.org/research/
Circle - http://www.civicyouth.org/?page_id=154
Future Majority - http://www.futuremajority.com

i have to agree with the above comment as well. there's so little institutional support for young progressives, both in financial terms and in the way of actual mentoring. i always hear older liberals talk about how young people need to be part of the movement, and yet i see very little effort on the part of progressive organizations to actually include youth participation in a substantive way. i'd suggest more self-reflection before the "me" generation criticizes today's youth.

I will cop to the fact that the headline asserts something about the Millennial Generation that I didn’t intend, although I can’t resist revealing that it was written by a 25-year-old ARC staffperson who grew up in Mississippi. A few people seem to be reacting to things that aren’t in the post. I never said that non-profits are attracting fewer young people – at ARC, at least, I find the opposite is true. And, to Toni’s comment, it was my generation that was called the ME generation, no other.

My post reflects on a very specific conversation. I am totally aware that Millennials bring an immense energy that is generating new organizing, mobilization and cultural models. To ignore that would make me, well, pretty dumb as well as blind. I was actually surprised to encounter this feeling in a 22-year-old, in part because there’s such exciting stuff going on -- much, much more of it than there was when I was 22.

When my colleague asked me why I thought he felt this way, I actually tried to answer that question, to understand him both politically and emotionally. We might not agree on the reasons why, but we shared them and I hope we’ll continue to do so. And look, the guy’s not just disaffected with the stuff I’ve created, but with all of politics, including the things other Millennials are doing. He’s a smart, hard working, conscious man – it seems to me that characterizing his disaffection as “unrepresentative” of the larger generation is a little disingenuous, and that he’s expressing a feeling that Millennials themselves need to deal with. What are you going to do with your own disaffected people?

Although he’s a little young to feel this way, the desire to be effective isn’t a bad thing. That’s where innovation comes from. My point is that when he finds that thing, he’s going to need the stamina and the community required to make it work. It doesn’t matter whether your project has been done a million times or never before, engagement takes staying power because it’s hard. We need to be able to keep going when even our own work reveals its shortfalls, as it inevitably will. In my experience, people of any age who have a mostly theoretical understanding of social change, who are newer to the actual process, often find themselves shocked and deflated by the gap between their ideals and reality. That gap always exists because human beings are flawed. Sometimes the ideals themselves need adjusting; other times, the reality does. When confronted with the gap, we have to make decisions. I believe that most commitments are made non-linearly, from the heart. At a certain point, one just has to surrender to the project of social change. And it’s not always going to be satisfying.