Introduction

Introduction

There is a small fortune to be made writing about the young. Neil Howe and the late William Strauss showed that in 1991 with their bestselling Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, and since then, Howe and Strauss have had a host of imitators.

Our national fascination with the young makes sense. It is more than a product of America’s historic fascination with youth culture. Parents want to know more about their children. Teachers want to know more about their students. Movie and television producers want to know more about their audiences. It helps to be able to distinguish between the interests of Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation Xers (1965-1981), and Millennials (1982-2003), and giving a label to each of these cohorts makes talking about them easier.

The problem is that it is easy for such labels to paper over differences within a generation and still easier for the labels to end up offering a compilation of statistical categories rather than in-depth understanding. There is, however, little incentive at present to move cautiously when it comes to playing the game of “Name That Generation.” In today’s competitive media world, the biggest rewards go to anyone who can come up with a generational label that sticks for even a little while.

This situation is one that has encouraged a series of writers who have specialized in studying generations to operate on the premise that they know more about the young than the young. Indeed, what is most distressing about so many of the books and essays we have about the young is that they refuse to let the young speak at length about themselves. For the authors of these books and essays, it is as if the inner lives of the young were a side issue that was not nearly so interesting as the circumstances the young have faced in coming of age.

We have tried to remedy this seen-but-not-heard problem by letting the young writers (all of them under thirty) who fill this special section of Dissent and who belong to the next generation to govern America speak about themselves in the first person. The model for our undertaking is Studs Terkel, who in such oral-history collections as Working and Hard Times put the voices of his subjects, not himself, front and center. We have simply taken Terkel one step further. Instead of interviewing our subjects, we have asked them to write out their thoughts and be in control of their words from the start.

We expect more writing from the young to appear in future issues of Dissent, and we think that as our collection of young, generational voices expands, it will provide an important record of how our new century began as well as an indication of where it is headed. The young who have come of age in recent years, and in the process bridged two centuries, have grown up with YouTube, Facebook, and e-mail, but the presence of the Internet in their lives has not meant, as so many of their critics have charged, that they only speak and think in shorthand.

The nine writers who are featured here come from a variety of backgrounds. Among them are an Iraqi vet, the son of a famous civil rights leader, a lawyer for children with special-education needs, a magazine editor, and a divinity student. But for all their differences, when it comes to their writing, what they have in common is a prose that is rich and complicated. They may have grown up with the Internet, but the Internet has certainly not stunted their ability to express themselves and describe the turn-of-the-century world they have inherited.

The shocks of recent years—from 9/11 to the Great Recession—have, as might be expected, made a deep impact on our writers and often elicited disappointment from them both with Washington and with the critics of Washington. But our writers have not used their disappointments as an excuse for arguing that at this stage of their lives their primary concern ought to be looking out for Number One. It is social engagement, not personal retreat, that most characterizes the lives of the writers who appear here. They have begun their lives by taking stock of themselves, then going out in the world. Rather than seeking refuge in the familiar, they have challenged themselves with jobs that include serving in the military, working in post–Katrina New Orleans, joining the Obama presidential campaign, and teaching in the inner city.

If anything unites them, it is their search for political and social solutions that don’t leave America isolated in the world or divided into a nation of haves and have-nots. By any historical yardstick, they are kindred spirits with the men and women whom Ralph Waldo Emerson, looking back on his own remarkable, nineteenth-century generation, described as the party of the future rather than the party of the past.

READ THEIR WORDS
Jessica Barrow: The State We Lost
Enoch Bevel: Faithful to My Father’s Dream
Sarah Cheever: Lost and Found
Neil Ellingson: From Dissent to Divinity School
Ilana Garon: Lessons from the Bronx
Ethan Porter: Coming to Washington
William J. Quinn: Between Cultures
Anne Marie Roderick: After the Flood
Tamara Williams: Growing a Soul

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and co-editor with Michael Walzer of Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press).