Just Fix It!
The twentysomething rebels' battle plan is to repair the damage their elders wrought and chart a new course
Twentysomethings are a generation in need of a press agent. Their elders think of them (when they think of them at all) as a generation of uppity, flesh-and-blood Bart Simpsons, so poorly educated that they can't find Vietnam on a map or come within 50 years of dating the Civil War. With their MTV-rotted minds and sound-bite attention spans, they are a whiny cohortwith the moral compass of street gang Bloods and Crips, a bunch of apathetic slackers who don't vote and couldn't care less. So where does this post-baby-boom generation get off thinking it is going to save the world?
Because it has no other choice, says Bill Strauss, co-author with Neil Howe of "13th Gen." It is a new book that argues that Americans born between 1961 and 1981 will be left with the "dirty work" of fixing inherited problems that other generations--the ones they see as selfish baby boomers and greedy seniors--lack the vision and political courage to resolve (excerpts, Page 57). Members of this "sacrificial generation," says Strauss, will be the ones hurt most by fallout from the debt crisis, disintegrating families, a growing racial disharmony and a poisoned environment. They are ennobled by a sense that they are a Repair Generation who will make the world better, but embittered by a belief that they are fixing problems not for themselves but for the future benefit of their younger brothers and sisters or of their own children. Complains Robert Lukefahr, 29, of Diversity & Division, a spirited journal of twentysomething opinion and angst: "We feel like a generation of janitors."
Grunge stuff. The big misconception about baby busters is that they will have little impact on American society other than to give it their paltry youth culture of grunge music, grunge movies and grunge fashion. In fact, twentysomethings, unnoticed and uncelebrated, are quietly applying their own solutions to a wide range of issues domestic and international. They are bringing a new style to problem solving and politics that is typical of their generation: Pragmatic, nonideological, high-tech, entrepreneurial and action oriented.
These young innovators include people like Wendy Kopp, 25, who has drawn some of the best young college graduates into underfunded public schools by starting Teach For America; Alan Khazei, 31, and Michael Brown, 32, two classmates at Harvard Law School who started Boston's City Year, an urban Peace Corps that is the shining model for Bill Clinton's call for national youth service, and Gregory D. Watson, 30, who literally changed the U.S. Constitution, almost single-handedly spurring ratification of the 27th Amendment that limits the ability of members of Congress to raise their pay.
This week, the vanguard of the twentysomething backlash against their elders will launch the newest American generational skirmish. A group called Lead or Leave, founded in 1992 by Rob Nelson, 29, and Jon Cowan, 27, to fight the federal deficit, will demonstrate on the steps of the Washington headquarters of the American Association of Retired Persons. Their beef: Entitlement programs for the elderly are a prime cause of rising federal spending yet aren't likely to be targeted for serious cuts. "The fundamental promise of democracy has been broken," complains Cowan. "You are supposed to always leave something better to your children and future generations."
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