Stop Blaming Participation Trophies. Blame the Patriot Act.
I’m 31. I remember the 1990s. I remember Saved By The Bell and Friends when they first aired. I remember Bill Clinton getting impeached. Hell, I even remember the Gulf War and writing letters to troops. Those my age share similar memories and experiences. Our Baby Boomer parents told us we were special and gave us participation trophies and worried about our self-esteem. Then we were forced to confront the world. I was a senior in high school when we watched smoke from Manhattan creep over the horizon.
My students don’t remember any of this. Nominally the same generation as me, they have no recollection of the 1990s, of pogs or snap bracelets or Napster. Most importantly, they have no memory of a pre-9/11 world. Millennials and Gen Y are one generation irreconcilably split in half by world events.
They have no memory of a world where privacy is expected or you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty by mob shaming. They have no memory of a world where the US isn’t under a terrorist threat and/or bombing at least two countries.
The 2000s created a generational divide and we see this most starkly in today’s debate about “safe spaces” and paternalism. This divide isn’t random and the manifestation of this new reality is something you should have seen coming all along; after all, you created it.
Gen Y watched from our college dorms as civil liberties were curtailed by a bipartisan Congress. We took a shot every time Dubya said “freedom” with no sense of irony, or mispronounced “Ahmadinejad” in a State of the Union address. I was lucky that only a few of my friends deployed to Iraq and they all came back.
Millennials have always had their lives controlled and monitored and, yes, protected. Millennials have always heard politicians telling them that they need government to protect them from existential or “transcendental” threats. Millennials have always had to take their shoes off at airports and be careful about what words they can and cannot type on social media.
Millennials have only ever known a world of institutional paternalism, of governmental expansion, of bureaucratic intervention.
The events that shaped my political beliefs and the beliefs of those around my age were those that Chris Hayes calls the “Fail Decade”: a decade that began with a divisive election, Enron, 9/11, the Patriot Act, Iraq… all by 2003.
Today’s 21 year old was 9 when we invaded Iraq.
By the time of the 2008 election, it’s no surprise that Gen Y, then-twentysomethings, helped propel Barack Obama into power, explicitly rejecting Clintonian Centrism, McCain’s brain-dead war-mongering, and the Beltway status quo. The dissatisfaction only grew when Obama failed to live up to his own promises, so we took another stab at voicing our dissatisfaction. Some fled to Occupy Wall Street. Others of us embraced the libertarian movement and non-interventionism. One of us was so dissatisfied with the status quo that he stole NSA secrets and is now living in Russia.
Millennials didn’t experience any of this. Millennials didn’t watch the country devolve into a security state. Millennials didn’t have to be taught to accept moral ambiguity as foreign policy. For Millennials, this is all normal.
So how can we be surprised when we now see stories of college students demanding paternalism and protection and “safe spaces”? Of course they expect it, it’s what they’ve been told to need their entire lives. You have raised an entire cohort of people to believe that security is more important than freedom, where speech has limits and civil liberties are extraneous.
Stop calling these students whiny and narcissistic. Stop telling them to toughen up. These are your children, America. You raised them to be this way. This is your creation. You supported these policies, this rhetoric, this devolution of American exceptionalism and pride. You demanded paternalism and acquiescence to state power. You demanded security above all else.
Here’s something else I remember from childhood:
Think of this lesson next time you want to knee-jerk a hot-take about how Millennials are spoiled and whiny. They didn’t learn it from participation trophies or social media.
They learned it by watching you.
