Wow, I think you just gave words to what I've been feeling and it makes a little bit more sense now.

I think another point of our generation includes the intersectionality of all these activist issues and the fact that things just become even more confusing when you are trying to address so many things at once and urge others to understand how our relations and place in this world intersect...sometimes it's impossible

Great piece, Courtney and thanks for sharing.

It always seemed to me that the answer to this paralysis is to focus on the large philosophical and cultural changes that are necessary, instead of each individual instance of injustice or disagreement.

While I vehemently hate the religious right, they have hit upon something here. Instead of going after each individual instance of something they disagree with, they have convinced multitudes of people to convert to their own cultural and philosophical worldview.

One of my disappointments with my generation is the inability to think in essentials and to apply such priciples to the myriad of political and social issues our generation faces. In my opinion it is why our generation often seems paralyzed. Just a thought.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it has to do with the demolition and demonization of the systems of leftist thought in this country. Marxism/Communism was a travesty from its very inception in the USSR, no argument there. But the 1950s really broke the back of the organized American Left, and organized groups of anarchists and non-communist socialists were destroyed. "Socialist" and "feminist" have been made into dirty words. But if we're talking about a coherent leftist cultural and philosphical system, that's really what we would be talking about.

Now, theocracies have spawned misery at least on a par with the USSR, but the point of view of the religious right in this country is faith-based, which means that they are constitutionally incapable of blaming their chosen system when things go awry--it can't be a problem with the Bible, or whatever, because the Bible is flawless. so the problem must be with the people who carried out the programs. It's akin to old leftists saying that the problem with the USSR was that it didn't follow Marx's teachings closely enough: Marx claimed that for communism to succeed, there would have to worldwide revolution and there wasn't; Marx wrote that such revolution could only occur in a fully industrialized economy, not an agrarian one like Russia's. Now, all that is true, but all that means is that Marx's program is rather unworkable, and that any attempt to put into place is doomed to failure. But there's no fundamental difference between saying that and saying that a nation just isn't godly enough.

On the one hand, I'd like to see a revival of socialist movements in this country. On the other hand, on the left and the right, I'm deeply suspicious of such programs. They so rarely end well once they achieve power.

By the way, I don't mean to imply that all religious people desire theocracy or that all right-wing programs are religious. But in the current context, the right wing is tied very closely to religious fanaticism.

As to religious world and cultural views that are left-leaning, there have been many (liberation theology for example), but they are not often feminist, and all would exclude the non-religious, which is not something I suspect the left wants to do.

Eh, I think that paralysis actually is caused by apathy, at least among many of my non-activist friends.

More specifically, I think:

paralysis = apathy = more thorough indoctrination than that of previous generations

I've never been a fan of journalists who attempt to make broad generalizations about this or that generation. But I like this statement by Friedman: "It's for all these reasons that I've been calling them ''Generation Q'' -- the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad." If it is true, and "Generation Q" is out getting their hands dirty fixing real world problems with boots on the ground, they will far surpass the baby boomers who made so much noise in the 60's and then got haircuts and bought an SUV.

If I can be allowed to make a sweeping generalization about "Generation Q" it would be that all those hippie-wannabe baby boomer parents of ours raised their children to care about the world and fulfill the dreams of activism that they were too self-absorbed to pursue, and we've all grown up and found out what we really want to do with our lives is help humanity, rather than smoke weed all day (of course, some among us seem to still prefer the latter.)

And I think "Quiet" is the wrong way to describe this generation. They are very noisy, but noise has been democratized and we can't all be heard, even the loudest and most righteous among us, above all the blogs and podcasts.

I think what we are seeing is a shift from Friedman's idea of protest, in corporeal form, to the modern state of virtual protest in online communities. Gradually, these communities will coalesce (e.g. MoveOn.org) into large voices that can be heard above the rest. We're still in that process, however. Give it time.

Hey Courtney, here's a quote for you: "What information consumes is ... the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention..." -Herbert Simon

@purdueattorney, I see what you're saying about embracing major cultural change but I sort of disagree with you about how the religious right has come to have so much power and shape policy in this country. I think they may have a big arching set of beliefs, but on a practical level they are focusing on the little things. For example the changes we've seen in reproductive rights and sex-ed have crept up on us, a few court cases at a time, and added up to major change; as opposed to a big change to outlaw abortion and condoms all at once. So maybe working from the little things, upwards is the more effective route.

all those hippie-wannabe baby boomer parents of ours raised their children to care about the world and fulfill the dreams of activism that they were too self-absorbed to pursue,

I know your post had a lot more in it this. I'm just singling it out because it's such a common offhand idea, and I hate it.

The Baby Boomers were peace activists and second-wave feminists and Black Panthers and Weathermen and SDS members. They were gay rights pioneers and civil rights activists. They brought ecological issues to the fore.

I don't know where this idea that Boomers are self-centered potheads comes from, but it's a canard. Our models of social activism and upheaval are based on the hard work and struggle of the boomers.

The fact that some of them were hippies and smoked up--well, who cares? The so-called "greatest generation" knocked back scotch like it was water. Is that so much better?

EG,
I didn't mean to sell the boomers completely short. I'm not so young I don't understand the accomplishments of that generation, which you list ably. I phrased the comments this way only to contrast what so many of them did versus what they're doing now, that is...they're running the country from top to bottom, and yet in some ways we're going backward (in others we're doing just fine, thanks.) My point is just that I feel there are more young people DOING these days than just SHOUTING, and I think that's sort of Friedman's point. It probably was the same back then, but the roles were reversed. The people standing around the reflecting pool in Washington weren't doing the work. It was the quiet ones. And it still is. My guess is that the quiet ones now outnumber the loud, and I think in the long run that will be better for the world.

What an eloquent, thoughtful response to the Friedman piece... thank you. I find myself getting so frustrated with pieces like that his - and David Brooks' stuff especially - that I become too angry to match their words the way you did here. It's perfect, and you nailed everything wrong with his - and Brooks' - perspective. Well done.

Some of us are overwhelmed and some of us are apathetic. That can be said of any generation.

But isn't a major difference the tools that are available? Taking to the streets in protest isn't the only way to put our feet on the ground, so to speak. If it had been possible for our parents to organize on the web, they would have.

Additionally I think that there is something to be said about growing up saturated in the stories of the baby boomers. Our concepts of protest and hippies started young. Protest and political activism may have been radical to our parents, but standing for what we believe in is not a novel idea to their children. They made sure of that.

We care. We work hard. We surround ourselves with people who care and work hard. But maybe we don't see the need to make such a fuss about it in the street to feel affective.

Thanks for that, Kaichester. I appreciate it.

From what little I remember from my research on social movements, one needs both sorts. One needs the radical shouters for the "radical flanking effect," wherein the mild-mannered reformers seem so much more reasonable to those in power when the alternative is radicals howling at the door. It's the way SNCC (who both shouted and worked) functioned for the SCLC. Not only did SNCC do so much vital work on their own, but they enabled Martin Luther King to say, though not in so many words, "Well, if you don't want to deal with me, there's always the SNCC kids down the line. Let me know how that works out."

oops- effective?

eedlebeedle

I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but the Religious Right is tied up into the large conversion and growth of the Evangelical movement generally. The conversion and growth of a large segment of the population (as a religious and philosophical base) allows the group to influence and affect policy across the board.

More liberal denominations have seen their numbers dwindle, while large evangelical churches are growing in number, in particular, amongst younger church members. This is the disturbing trend I see. One that needs to be addressed on the cultural and philosophical level.

Also, to address further my point above, protest by itself is never enough. One needs to provide a consistent, positive set of philosophical and political alternatives.

Overwhelmed indeed! And why shouldn't we be. After all, the main thrust of the right-wing back lash of the last thirty years has been to smash the social and economic support systems that made alot
of the pioneering movements of the 60's and 70's possible: the attacks on unions, dismantling large portions of the New Deal and its attendant economy, the construction of the prison industrial complex along side an ongoing vicious attack on civil rights. In short the rise of neo-liberalism at home and abroad has been an institutional response to all the challenges of the powers that be: feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, socialism, anti-imperialism, gay rights, indigenous struggles and all the rest.
Sure people get overwhelmed at times- that's the whole point of the class war that's been waged from above. Of course
Friedman, arch neo-liberal that he is, is more than happy with the notion of Generation Quiet: as long as they're just that, quiet. Let them get too noisy, as they often do despite everything that's been thrown at them, and he, as well as the rest of the NYT crowd, comes down like a ton of bricks.

When I was in my twenties, we were called slackers. When I looked around at my friends I couldn't have disagreed more. Now that I'm in my early forties, I don't hear anyone calling us slackers any more.

I think older generations often don't understand younger ones and therefore make sweeping generalizations based on their own experiences. In this case, I think Friedman is wrong to call a generation "quiet" because they are "too online". Who says online = quiet? I hear more from online voices than I hear anywhere else these days!

When I was in my twenties, we were called slackers. When I looked around at my friends I couldn't have disagreed more. Now that I'm in my early forties, I don't hear anyone calling us slackers any more.

I think older generations often don't understand younger ones and therefore make sweeping generalizations based on their own experiences. In this case, I think Friedman is wrong to call a generation "quiet" because they are "too online". Who says online = quiet? I hear more from online voices than I hear anywhere else these days!

When I was in my twenties, we were called slackers. When I looked around at my friends I couldn't have disagreed more. Now that I'm in my early forties, I don't hear anyone calling us slackers any more.

I think older generations often don't understand younger ones and therefore make sweeping generalizations based on their own experiences. In this case, I think Friedman is wrong to call a generation "quiet" because they are "too online". Who says online = quiet? I hear more from online voices than I hear anywhere else these days!

When I was in my twenties, we were called slackers. When I looked around at my friends I couldn't have disagreed more. Now that I'm in my early forties, I don't hear anyone calling us slackers any more.

I think older generations often don't understand younger ones and therefore make sweeping generalizations based on their own experiences. In this case, I think Friedman is wrong to call a generation "quiet" because they are "too online". Who says online = quiet? I hear more from online voices than I hear anywhere else these days!

When I was in my twenties, we were called slackers. When I looked around at my friends I couldn't have disagreed more. Now that I'm in my early forties, I don't hear anyone calling us slackers any more.

I think older generations often don't understand younger ones and therefore make sweeping generalizations based on their own experiences. In this case, I think Friedman is wrong to call a generation "quiet" because they are "too online". Who says online = quiet? I hear more from online voices than I hear anywhere else these days!

When I was in my twenties, we were called slackers. When I looked around at my friends I couldn't have disagreed more. Now that I'm in my early forties, I don't hear anyone calling us slackers any more.

I think older generations often don't understand younger ones and therefore make sweeping generalizations based on their own experiences. In this case, I think Friedman is wrong to call a generation "quiet" because they are "too online". Who says online = quiet? I hear more from online voices than I hear anywhere else these days!

I feel like what both Thomas Friedman and your article were getting at is ultimately similar: we care, but our actions are (and feel like) a drop in the bucket. I share your frustration with traditional activism that assumes that just protesting something means you've done your best. I've just finished Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine (READ IT ONE AND ALL, IT IS SO GOOD) and I'm thinking that what may be the problem is this:
we just don't live in a true democracy any more If there ever was one)!
We are (most of us, depending on where we live) still allowed to vote, but voting is so clearly not the only thing that makes a democracy represent its people. I don't like glibly talking about democracy and its wonders without getting into details of what our ideal democracy would look like, and NOT using the U.S. as the picture of an ideal democracy. The point is, how can a democratic government wage a war its people never wanted? How can a democratic government treat its citizens in New Orleans worse than non-citizens across the world? And how can our voices get heard besides all our traditional methods of getting them out there (including feel-good do-nothing marches, letters to your congressperson or sent by MoveOn)? I think this is something all of us with our supposedly divisive single-issue politics could start to rally around: if we could rebuild our democracy from the bottom up, setting aside the corporations and rich people who run it now, what would it look like? How can democracies represent constituents' opinions in ways besides voting?

My advice to you is go back on the road and recruit as many women in my generation as you can. Becuase the progression of twenty years is falling black slowly by being overwhelmed and not caring period.

Your piece plus the insight "Generation Q" is actually made up of "the aware and overwhelmed, and the unaware and conspicuously consuming."
Is dead on. Thanks.

Our generation is definitely overwhelmed. Not only does it have to deal with everything that has already been said on this thread, I believe most of us aren't convinced that mere change is what is needed. For those of us who weren't even alive until after the great political movements of the '60s and '70s, all we know is the world after them. But that world is still messed up, and a lot of the flaws are the flaws that those movements tried to fix, or stem from the change that was supposed to fix them in the first place. With a worldview like that, is it any wonder that we're skeptical and cynical? Is it any wonder that we go about changing the world as best we can in our own lives and don't subscribe to the grand movements that seem to us to have been tried already and proven ineffectual?

I think that the idea of the "two types" actually hits the nail on the head better. Not all people are simply "overwhelmed". Some are trully UNaware and conspicuously consuming.

Friedman is right. The Q generation is in a materialistic malaise. Disagree? where's the peace movement? where's the fucking peace movement?

Re contributions of the baby boomer generation, check out Leonard Steinhorn's book The Greater Generation which is a passionate defense of the ways in which many boomers have, and continue to worked for the progressive aspects of the world we now live in.

In a lot of ways, I dislike attempts like Friedman's to encapsulate the zeitgeist of a generation--each cohort of individuals who share roughly the same age-range. Why should we be identified as all sharing the same blanket identity? (This is the same problem I have with the "second wave"/"third wave" distinction).

Having begun with that caveat, I have to admit that I really identify with your articulation, Courtney, of the "overwhelmed" nature of our lives.

My generation tries to create lives that seem to match our values, but beyond that it's hard to locate a place to put our outrage.

I just started graduate school in history and library science, with the idea that I might eventually be able to put my interest in history to use empowering historically dis-empowered groups by preserving and making accessible marginalized histories. But everyday, I struggle to remember that this work is important and relevant--that I have real, articulated values that it supports. I worry that I'm not doing enough TODAY to effect the change I want to see in the world. Even as I know I only have so many hours and so much energy, and that not taking care of myself and the people I care for is also a kind of neglect that is contrary to my deepest values.

I have friends who grew up in conservative religious-right settings, and I envied them their atmosphere of certainty: they had a prescription handed to them detailing how to live a moral life and how to work for change in the world. Those of use who don't accept such totalizing answers are faced with a much more complex challenge of figuring out how to bring our own skills to bear in making the world a little better. It's absolutely emotionally, intellectually, and physically overwhelming.

I'm not sure the world is WORSE off, or MORE complicated than it was when our parents were in their twenties, or their parents were in their twenties. I know that, culturally, we're more skeptical of big-picture explanations or solutions (eg Marxism; dogmatic feminism). And the amount of information demanding our attention has exponentially increased with changing technology, so it's really easy to feel like we have NO EXcUSE for not being 200% informed about every issue we care about.

No doubt there are people who are just tuned out politically and don't care about that fact (which is why generational generalizations are too simplistic to be useful, in my option) . . . but I agree with your argument that many of us are struggling to stay afloat financially, physically, emotionally, and morally--my friends and I have earnest discussions on a regular basis about how to live in the world, and I believe all of us are taking small, uncertain steps, in positive directions . . . but the odds feel stacked against us, and it would be nice to have people tell us, "We know this is difficult, you're trying so hard, how can we support you?" instead of excoriating us for our lack of progress.

where's the peace movement? where's the fucking peace movement?

We lost.

Seriously. Don't you remember the lead-up to the war? Don't you remember the organizing? The rallies and marches of millions of people that, at the one I went to in NYC, actually flooded three times the number of avenues closed off for it?

What's different about these days isn't the generations. It's the power structure. Our government is far less beholden and far more media savvy now than it was then. The 2000 election was stolen. Television news can't even show us flag-draped coffins, let alone the kind on-the-spot coverage of the slaughter that galvanized the 1960s peace activists. Our mass protests went completely ignored and dismissed. Most of the country simply cannot boycott gasoline companies, which might actually work.

People are apathetic because they're dispirited. And they're dispirited because in this supposed democracy, we the people have almost no impact whatsoever on government actions.

I could not agree with Courtney more. Generation Q (or X or Y or whichever broad category we're applying here) is dealing with an excess of information and atrocity -- there is so much to be outraged about that's virtually impossible to stay focused.

But I really think the main problem, is that "Gen Q" *is* worse off than their parents. We might have access to near-magical technologies for organizing protest, but we (esp. in major urban centers) are struggling to get by: Insurance is a luxury and home-ownership a fantasy. Many of us are saddled with crippling student loans. When you're struggling to meet your basic needs it's so much harder to take the time to fight the good fight.