The youth of today

Missing in Antiwar Action

Recently I finished teaching a freshman seminar at Harvard called "From Reform to Revolution: Youth Culture in the 1960s." When I built the syllabus, I asked students to ponder a single, overarching question: "How did the youth rebellion of the 1960s happen?" That is, what caused millions of young people to pierce the bland and platitudinous din that characterized the early Cold War years? Why did so many youths -- many of them affluent and college-educated -- suddenly decide that American society needed to be radically overhauled?

But as the semester progressed, my students frequently turned the question around: Why is there no rising protest movement among young people today? At the very least, they asked, shouldn't we be seeing more antiwar activity? According to a CNN poll this month, 67 percent of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and more than half would like to see all U.S. troops home by year's end. Given that it was not until August 1968 that a majority of Americans began calling the Vietnam War a "mistake," this is a remarkable statistic. By 1968, of course, antiwar teach-ins, sit-ins and marches were commonplace on many campuses; demonstrators had violently clashed with soldiers on the steps of the Pentagon; and the Democratic National Convention had descended into chaos over the war.

Today, grass-roots antiwar activism has not been entirely absent. But one would be hard-pressed to argue that we're on the cusp of a rising protest movement. Why not?

I found this little tid-bit interesting:

Nor are many students likely to be socialized into antiwar activism. Every campus has its left-wing organizers, but today the gauzy idealism that circulated among teenagers in the 1960s seems almost freakishly anomalous. According to a recent U.S. Census report, 79 percent of college freshmen in 1970 said that "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" was among their goals, whereas only 36 percent said becoming wealthy was a high priority. By contrast, in 2005, 75 percent of incoming students listed "being very well off financially" among their chief aims.

Here is one quiet protest, started by a middle-aged man.