Animal House
A few thoughts on this generation of college students, of whom my own kids are two.
Both of my kids are in college. My daughter attends school in Los Angeles and my son is about to graduate from art school here in Savannah. When I think about their school years, I can’t help but feel despondent at all they’ve already had to endure before taking their first full steps into adulthood.
My son, Elijah, was born seven months before 9/11. We were watching the news together that morning, me on the couch, he in his bouncy chair shoving Cheerios in his mouth, as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I remember leaving him to his cereal as I woke up Martha to tell her the news. It was clear to everybody that the world had just broken.
Ruthie was born a couple years later, two months after the US invaded Iraq in retaliation for 9/11, which Iraq had nothing to do with. It was madness. People knew it was madness at the time. We did it anyway, for reasons that remain indecipherable twenty-two years after the fact.
When Obama got elected, it felt as though maybe we’d turned the corner on the madness of the previous eight years, and his first administration did feel like a return to normalcy. What I didn’t understand at the time, and maybe nobody did, was that the Obama years were the last recognizable years of the America I knew, or thought I knew.
The kids were too young to have any sense of the world much beyond their hometown in Connecticut. They felt safe there. We all did. At least until the Sandy Hook massacre, which took place a few miles down the road. My kids were in elementary school that day, Elijah in fifth grade and Ruthie in third. One zip code away, kids their age were being shepherded from school by SWAT teams, and 20 first-graders lay dead. Six staff. That was the moment America finally, and irrevocably, broke for me.
They witnessed the chaos of the Trump years, leading into the pandemic, which shut down the schools. Then came the Black Lives Matter protests and the twin Trump impeachments, which took us to the 2020 election and the Capitol Attack. There followed Ukraine, and now Israel and the college protests. Around the globe, a rising illiberalism – fascism lite – has taken root abroad and, increasingly, here. Their lives have been filled with chaos, war, illness, and uncertainty.
I can’t tell you how proud I am of my kids, and all the kids of their generation who have persevered through all of it. People my age and older at least have a sense of what this country looks like when it appears functional. Today’s kids don’t even have that. Their lives have been dictated by events so traumatic it turned half of them trans. (A joke.) And in the background of all of that noise is the persistent buzz of climate change promising to upend the world even further. Oh yeah, they’ve also got an average of $30,000 in student debt before they even finish school.
How do these kids even have the mental bandwidth to do their homework?
So when I see the olds coming down hard on the college protestors, I kind of want to smack them in the face. This generation of young adults, having endured so much, still has enough optimism and faith in the power of people to affect change that they’re willing to put their bodies at risk in service of a cause greater than themselves.
Yes, I’m personally conflicted about the protests. I’m shocked at the hatred they seem to have unleashed. I’m furious at the barrage of propaganda and manipulation, and the cynical politicians on both sides - and around the world - trying to take advantage of the situation. Yet I can’t help but feel gratitude to these kids for showing us what it looks like to believe.
It's that shiny-eyed belief that’s maybe the most heartbreaking aspect to me. Because I remember what it was like to believe. I remember my admiration for the kids from the generation before my own when they protested the Vietnam War and marched for the Civil Rights movement. I remember seeing the musical Hair when I was a kid (no nudity in that production) and thinking that I wanted to be like those freaky long-hairs one day. And then I remember, years later, attending the Broadway revival of Hair and feeling nothing but hatred towards those hippies because I knew who they had grown up to become.
Like generations before me, I feel like I owe my kids an apology. I’m sorry. I thought the world would be better than it is. I thought my generation would do a better job than it has. I thought America would always endure. I thought the long arc of history bends towards justice. I thought Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election. I thought college would be a lot like Animal House. I thought a lot of things that turned out to be incorrect.
We owe my kids, and yours, and all the kids to come, more than our sniggering and facile judgments. We owe them gratitude for their resilience and their faith. As I said, I think America is irrevocably broken. Maybe this generation can forestall the inevitable. Maybe they’ll surprise me and fix that which looks, to my eye, unfixable.
Perhaps the reason so many Americans look down their noses at the protestors is because they’ve lost that optimism in themselves, and it hurts to see people who have not. I’m not hopeful. But even though I don’t share their faith, I owe them the courtesy of not shitting on theirs.
Congratulations to all the graduates. You’ve already accomplished more than should have been possible. I wish you the best possible luck as you make your way in this fucked-up country. May you deliver better results for our nation than she deserves.
This has the makings of an excellent commencement speech.
Great read. Exactly put into words how I feel, and I think our kids are the same age. Both my kids don't want to vote for Biden, though, and that scares the shit out of me since one is Transgender.