In 2003, I had studied Shakespeare's King Lear with a fifty-year old English Professor. She was a disciplinarian, holding meetings and giving assignments during summer and winter breaks. I showed up for an appointment, instead of driving down to Washington D.C. with friends to protest Bush's State Of the Union address, and this professor implied that I was doing the right thing as a student while being negligent as a citizen.
I could have told her that, as a student, my duty was to study the rhetoric of King Lear in Act One alongside the NPR broadcast of Bush's address.
It is in fact the burning spear of activism to learn the human condition and the great flaws of authority in their wish for praise through speech. Language determines reality-even a foppish leader like Lear or Bush may shape a political and cultural reality with what they say, as long as those listening are unaware of the power of language as a medium.
What good is a protest in Washington D.C. these days? It has been discussed by writers and philosophers before, that when culture loses language, it resorts to spectacle; instead of expressing itself, it uses a sign that barely means anything beyond what it speaks to.
When it comes to protest, Americans in college feel compelled to go through the motions with bumper stickers on Volvos and on-campus gatherings to match up to the protests that went on the sixties.
It seems that we are superficial. Being a part of this Generation (either Y or Next), I use the word "seem." Our generation seems to question authority and then violate our own convictions; watch television shows and play video games that turn us back into sheep.
In the past two decades there has been skepticism about what's coming down the line. Generation X had been labeled as uninformed slackers. Generation Next has mixed reviews. Judy Woodruff's hour long documentary on PBS labels us as informed and engaged.
Observing our generation, even civic-minded on-screen commentary makes things seem to be more absolute than in reality. Being informed and engaged is a citizen's duty-no one deserves acknowledgment for that. It is no victory for mankind that people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five discuss unattractive issues like Global Warming. In fact, more people are talking issues, yet national dialogue has become watered down and mysteriously ephemeral.
Are we in danger of becoming docile, or is it our medium for public discourse, the screen, that is falling short?
David Graeber wrote an Op-ed in Harper's called Army of Altruists (January 2007). Graeber's aim in the piece was to give merit to all who are interested in social reform, to wash away a warring split between universities and the working class that has existed since the sixties. He concluded this point about the result of the social activism during the sixties:
“…it is also easier to see what really happened at the universities in the wake of the 1960's…Campus radicals set out to create a new society that destroyed the distinction between egoism and altruism, value and values. It did not work out, but they were, effectively, offered a kind of compensation: the privilege to use the university system to create lives that did so, in their own little way, to be supported in one's material needs while pursuing virtue…”
This observation is not the main point of Greaber's op-ed, though, in observing the job of generations, it is well seen. Within Generation Next, we in the upper-middle class have hippie-became-yuppie-then morphed back to hippie-again parents that pay for our college. Some of us belong to families of lower income, and have scholarships. All of us have professors that push us to open up debate.
We have the tools for a different kind of protest than what was required in the sixties. Back then, television was a tool for civic-reform; non-violent forms of civil disobedience, such as sit-ins at restaurants and other public spaces, led to upsetting, violence that the public witnessed on the few television channels the country had. The public reacted. The Supreme Court stepped up their argument for ruling segregation as unconstitutional.
This would not happen today. Through the many television news channels marked either blue or red, the hammering end of protest has gone soft. Even the sincere spectacles are lost attempts to rouse us. In the opening of the Iraq war, the media focused on Sean Penn's visit to Baghdad, and chose not to open up a mature discussion about the regular Americans that did a "sit-in" not in front of the capitol of today's Vietnam as a human shield to the shock and awe invasion. Cindy Sheehan and her squad of military mothers had "sat" in front of Bush's ranch in Crawford, and television offers the padding of punditry that, in the defense of the President, colors the sitters as traitors without any regard to the President's vacation time.
