i remember sitting on a panel in college with several students and a Dean, and we were answering questions from an alumni group. they were concerned that we students at the dawn of the 21st century weren't protesting like they were (this was pre-Bush, pre-Iraq, post-Lewinsky) back in the 1960s. they found this a bad thing.
i was surprised when the Dean said, much to his credit, that he always found himself having to defend "students today" to people his own age. the golden age of protests, or at least obvious engagement, was the 1960s, it's true. but "students today" were noted for vastly higher rates of volunteerism in any number of areas. so rather than yelling about something as a public sign of your engagement, kids today were actually out building houses, tutoring students, visiting nursing homes, etc. they were actually being the change they wished to see in the world, as opposed to their SDS parents who had a big, obvious enemy to yell about.
what were we going to yell about? Kosovo?
Did we yell as much as they would have about Iraq, though? Guantanamo? Patriot Act? Wall Street?
I don't have an answer, though I'd like to.
I have lots of college memories like yours, but with reference to the thread one that stands out in my mind is reading Rorty's
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity in a 200-level philosophy class. The professor was very much a "60s radical" to make INDY's lips curl and his skin crawl (grizzled, slouchy-nerdy JuBu full of wryly self-deprecating stories about his youthful misadventures...my favorite involved the time a girl he was in love with wheedled him into accompanying her to Maharishi Mahish Yogi's ashram for some sadly ill-fated 'yogic flying' courses...but I digress). Anyway, he was completely enamored of Rorty's case that metaphysics is dead and with it the categories we've historically employed to dehumanize and persecute others, that the future lies in acknowledging and embracing the radical contingency of the belief systems we inherit and finding in that a renewed solidarity through opposition to cruelty. But there was a total generational disconnect in that classroom, because while he saw in it this exhilarating liberatory pedagogy, we all more or less just shrugged, because to us Rorty was simply describing, you know,
reality. I mean that's an oversimplification of how it actually played out, but that was the gist of it. And it seemed to me the reason for that was that he'd been raised wholly without the deep-seated skepticism towards and 'ironic' detachment from basic social institutions that we, growing up after the "golden age of obvious engagement" as you put it, had passively absorbed from day one. What I can't quite get around about that--and I'm sure this is influenced by purely personal factors, like the particular parents I had and the sense of what I have to live up to that established--is, Was the reason he, and they, and all those others became so involved in some part precisely because they unhesitatingly embraced those ideals, and therefore reacted with righteous outrage rather than cynical apathy to see them betrayed so badly? Would we be able to do the same if circumstances called for it?
I do also identify with the defensive moments like you're describing... "Well in OUR day we stopped a war, ended racial segregation, opened the workplace to women, we
changed the world, you kids don't care about anything blah blah blah" "Translation, you spent most of the time stoned off your ass screwing anonymous people with no fear of AIDS, then you got fat and consumerist and voted for Reagan blah blah blah" ...been there, done that. But I've never felt sure of my place in either situation.
