Here's a comment I left at Uncouth Reflections about the campus protests at Oklahoma over some frat bros singing a song with "nigger" in it.
The radically different climate on campuses these days compared to the Vietnam War era is a sorely overlooked change. People see a campus protest and write it off as the legacy of the Vietnam era, but they're too different these days to lump into the same phenomenon.
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Youth activism sure has come a long way since the ’60s. Back then, it was students protesting actions by the government. And they tried to enlist as many of their peers in the movement as they could.
Now it’s one subculture of students protesting against another group of their peers. And it’s over speech rather than actions. And they’re eager to receive the help of the government, the school administration, and other authority figures, in their so-called struggle.
It goes to show how infantilized the Millennials are. These gay college slapfights are sibling rivalries, with the whinier sibling squealing as loud as possible to the parents to intervene and make the mean sibling stop saying mean things because their very self-esteem is at stake.
If we run into Marty McFly this year, we must go back to 1985 and abort the Millennial generation.
Yeah, I think this is accurate, although I'd soften the argument by pointing out the other forces that lead to these group versus group contests that you've pointed out earlier, plus these are college age kids and even during the outgoing period kids still appealed to parental authority to solve sibling disputes well into their teens (so infantilised, really, is hyperbole).
ReplyDeleteOtherwise seems accurate - Millennials are more risk averse, less easily form tight in groups and scenes (where the ingroup is trusted and the outgroup is rejected), forced march quickly through adolescence while hanging on to their childhood, and are hovered over by helicopter Boomers, or worse Gen Xers (who are similar, but replacing the positive qualities of enthusiasm and optimism with world weariness and cynicism and a little bitterness, and who have less of a life outside monitoring their kids).
Protests they make will be appealing to authority or childishly irritating it (as per Anonymous) or they'll move straight through to being adults who accommodate and work with or oppose the power in a constructive way.
The contrast with Vietnam in the US is a strong one. Now Vietnam was probably a particularly reasonable thing to protest - the VietComs have proven to be people who've pretty much built the country in a decent way, and American war crimes there were terrible, so its a war that's hard to justify.
But set this aside, and it still tells us something about the Boomers - consider the defining characteristics of the Boomers - they prolonged and exaggerated their adolescence (perpetual adolescents) and were status obsessed Me Generation strivers. It's said that the Twentieth Century invented the teenager and while it didn't, the Boomers were really a group who made a massive huge obsession and deal over puberty and adolescence in a way the groups before them didn't and the groups who followed them would uninvent.
When Boomer college students organized most strongly as a group, it wasn't over any petty name calling... but at the same time also wasn't really any noble and egalitarian stand for the people as a community. It was an exaggerated essentially a form of draft dodging - dodging the consequences of war in the form of conscription and taxes that would've interfered with their dope smoking teenage kicks individualistic striving bullshit.
It was a markedly college age oriented form of anti-war protests particularly because of the marked irresponsibility of the Boomers. Consider the form their protests took - mostly "rebellious" in an adolescent way, about dodging the adult responsibility of conscription that the Greatest Gen took on the chin and populated by poseurs who were doing it to score chicks and look cool - by contrasts Progtards and SJWs of a more recent vintage seem totally and sincerely committed to the part, even if they're crazy and lack emotional maturity.
"he Boomers were really a group who made a massive huge obsession and deal over puberty and adolescence in a way the groups before them didn't and the groups who followed them would uninvent."
ReplyDeleteI think this is more a trait of rising-crime than it is something specifically with the Boomers. The early 20th century, 1900-1935, was also obsessed with adolescence. As this article explains:
"American adolescents were displaying traits unknown among children and adults. Although the word teenager did not come into use until decades later, the teenage mindset dawned in the 1920s."
http://www.ushistory.org/us/46c.asp
Though, truth be told, the obsession with adolescence probably started before the 1920s in the 1900s when crime was rising, just becoming more apparent in the '20s.
Furthermore, the '80s also had a robust teenage culture and a media obssesed with teenagers, even though it was Gen X who were coming of age then.
Here's some more basic info. This article is apt in drawing a parallel between the 1920s and 1960s, as both eras saw a rise in crime and equality(fall in immigration):
ReplyDelete"Thanks to the richness of the new recording media of film, phonograph, and glossy magazine, the imagery of the 1920s remains deeply etched on the popular memory. Like the 1960s, the 1920s are remembered as 'teenage' years in which an older generation said: 'Thou shalt not' and youth replied: 'I will!' Youth itself was one essential element in the iconography of the decade. When not dancing or kissing, the carefree flapper and her boyfriend were commonly depicted seated in an automobile, for the motor car was another key symbol of the so-called 'Jazz Age'. - See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/peter-ling/sex-and-automobile-"
http://www.historytoday.com/peter-ling/sex-and-automobile-jazz-age
"When Boomer college students organized most strongly as a group, it wasn't over any petty name calling... but at the same time also wasn't really any noble and egalitarian stand for the people as a community. It was an exaggerated essentially a form of draft dodging"
ReplyDeleteWhen the Boomers began to dominate the establishment in the later 80's/90's and beyond, they didn't really do a whole lot to bolster the idea that they were conscientious about anything, up to and including warfare. It goes without saying that Silents (an Oxymoron for a big mouth like John McCain) and Boomers have presided over ever growing, ever bloodier conflicts with as many people as possible.
And, you know, funny that when the Boomer's children are at stake, we still don't have a draft. In their eyes, war might be a fact of life (a "fact" which they do nothing to stop) but some of us don't "deserve" to be in the war machine.
I do wonder about how Boomers would've treated the draft had a Pearl Harbor type event happened in the 60's. I don't think resistance would've been as strong as it was to Vietnam, but they certainly would not have emulated the Greatest Gen. by allowing the process to happen without complaint.
"dodging the adult responsibility of conscription that the Greatest Gen took on the chin and populated by poseurs who were doing it to score chicks and look cool"
The late 60's saw the 1st signs of status striving, though it remained relatively uncommon for quite some time. I do think that some of the liberal protesters actually were sincerely idealistic albeit often very misguided. By the 1980's, the Me Generation had fully (and infamously) sold out. Not that vast evidence to the contrary stopped that generation from continuing to affect a conscientious stance decades after being exposed as the arrogant charlatans and schemers that they are.
At least the Boomers wanted to put effort into looking cool and scoring. As Agnostic has said several times, Millennials (including young SJWs) just want to be validated/accepted by default with minimal effort. I guess being raised in an autistic, anything goes type of society will do that.
ReplyDeleteTo the extent that Millennials are involved in PC thought policing, let's not forget that this BS picked up steam in the early 90's when many Millennials weren't even born yet. The Status striving PC nonsense seems to have infected everyone, though as I've said before Gen X-ers are the least enthusiastic about it (they're self effacing and they don't like preaching).
Unfortunately, the Millennials have picked up the preaching baton from the Boomers. It might be too early to tell if Millennials will be as corrosive. One thing in their favor is that they will never have the money/power (and thus, influence) that the Boomers had from a young age. Some of this stuff is as much about opportunity as it is innate character. So far I don't think Millennials have shown the kind of cold blooded predation that the Boomers did. But maybe it's just a matter time and/or opportunity.
I hope the Boomers don't die before I have the chance to murder them.
ReplyDelete