The sight is familiar to most of us by now: a cluster of war protesters gathered on a street corner at rush hour. They wave. They chant peace slogans. They hold up signs asking the passerby to “Honk for peace!” or “Get us out of Iraq now!”
But despite their colorful signs and cheers, I can’t help but be drawn to something else about these protesters: their age. These are not the young faces I see behind anti-war banners in my history books. In fact, they look like they could be the very people in those photographs, plus 40 years and minus the tie-dye.
So what gives? Where are the young people?
One argument, of course, is that people my age aren’t protesting the Iraq war because we simply don’t care. That perspective goes something like this: When our parents saw America at war, they marched and picketed and burned draft cards. When they saw injustice, they launched movements. When people didn’t listen, they fought until they did. But now civic responsibility has gone the way of bell-bottoms and Afros, and today’s young people are too busy with Facebook and reality TV to notice what’s going on in the world. We’re willfully uninformed and deliberately uninvolved.
That’s what I’ve heard, but I don’t buy it. Because while you may not see us holding signs on street corners, young Americans certainly are not sitting at home letting the world crash down all around us.
We may have different priorities than our parents and grandparents, but that is not to say that they are wrong. Generations rise to the necessities of their time, and that is exactly what we have done. Look at Nick Anderson and Ana Slavin, the Massachusetts high school students who founded Dollars for Darfur, a grassroots advocacy organization that has raised more than $400,000 from other teens for anti-genocide efforts. Or the 13 University of Colorado students who went on a 15-day hunger strike in 2006 to protest sweatshop labor in the manufacture of licensed CU apparel. And what about the hundreds of young people who attended the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August as activists, protesters and participants?
It’s not that we have stopped caring about the world, it’s simply that we haven’t embraced a single, visible cause to care about above all others. At the college I attend, a wealthy Southern private school that is not exactly known for its activism, I am bombarded every day by different ways that I can change the world. A fundraiser for a school in Africa. A training session for tutoring inner-city middle school students. A meeting of the environmental alliance. When I look around me I don’t see a generation of complacent, uncaring individuals. I see a group of people so overwhelmed by the problems in the world that they don’t know where to begin to change things.
None of this is to say, of course, that some young people are not apathetic, that some of us won’t ever get involved in the world beyond our hometown or job or college campus. But I refuse to believe this kind of apathy is an age-specific quality. It’s easy to pin young people as lazy or distanced, but nearly a third of middle-aged people (45 to 54) didn’t vote in the last presidential election. Getting older isn’t a cure-all for not caring.
And anyway, to create such a simple dichotomy between “caring” and “apathy” is to reduce the world to terms it doesn’t exist in. All people care about what they need to care about, and if we are lucky, a few things beyond that. American young people are no different. Inundated every day by a world bereft with problems, we are trying just like everyone else to simply make sense of it all.
So if you don’t see us on the street corners, it’s not because we’re not paying attention. We’ve simply found different ways to make ourselves heard.
Ryan Brown grew up in Colorado and currently is a sophomore at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where she is a features writer for the student newspaper and co-editor of the undergraduate literary magazine.
