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."
What most motivates the baby busters is their dread that the American Dream is over, at least for them. They fear they are likely to be the first generation to fail to match their parents' economic success. Already, they are the adults most likely to live with their parents (58 percent of all unmarried singles ages 20 to 24, according to a new Census Bureau report), the least likely to own a home (home ownership among those under age 25 dropped by 35 percent between 1973 and 1990) and the least likely to see their income keep up with inflation. If others dismiss the twentysomething alarm of economic backsliding as the disquietude of youth, economic trends say the buster future-phobia is right on target. In the economic growth decade between 1980 and 1990, the median income of Americans under age 25 declined by 10.8 percent. For all others, however, income grew by 6.5 percent. Today's college students graduate with the nagging fear that a good and expensive education may not be enough to keep them out of low-pay, low-skill McJobs.
The economic shaft. Most annoying to twentysomethings is their belief that a massive redistribution of wealth is taking place. It is not so much a gap between the rich and poor, says Ron Crouch, of the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville, as it is a widening gulf between young and old. For people age 65 and older, income grew by 21 percent last decade, in part because Social Security checks are indexed for inflation, while the minimum wage failed to climb with inflation.
Young people see the workplace rigged against them: They will pay a higher percentage of their incomes to Social Security taxes than any generation before them, but less than 30 percent expect that they will ever draw out of Social Security what they put in. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan notes that a male worker in his late 30s who earns an average wage his entire life, now $23,700, and retires at 66 in the year 2020 will get back only 76 percent of what he and his employer paid into the Social Security trust fund; his colleague who has earned the maximum taxable salary--now set at $57,600--will get back only 53 percent. To post-boomers, the national debt, which was just $829 billion when they were school kids in 1979 and is now over $4.2 trillion, confirms the popular bumper sticker sentiment: "We're Spending Our Children's Inheritance."
Another thing that grates on twentysomethings is the societal hegemony of baby boomers, who now have one of their own as president. It is an article of faith that this dominance is caused in great measure by the sheer size of the baby boom cohort. But Strauss, 46, and Howe, 41, argue that the post-boom generation is actually bigger--79 million compared with the 69 million boomers. They make this case by moving generational lines a bit. Traditionally, baby boomers were classified as those born between 1946 and 1964, the final year of exceptionally high postwar birthrates. But Strauss notes correctly that Americans born after 1960 rarely identify with boomers, so he lumps them into a separate generation with anyone born through 1981. This means baby busters will become the nation's largest voting bloc by 1998.
There are experiences unique to twentysomethings that give them generational coherence. Most of all, post-boomers make up a survivor generation. They are the children of divorce. (Some 40 percent grew up in broken families.) They are the children of neglect. (Through the 1970s, 12 percent of elementary school children and 30 percent of middle school kids were latchkey children, triple the rate of the previous decade.) They are the victims of declining educational standards. (Three quarters of college professors say students are "seriously unprepared in basic skills.")
Consequently, post-boomers learned early to fend for themselves and to be cynical about adults. This has shaped the way they are now beginning to fix the nation. Among the traits that set the Repair Generation apart:
They want to beat the system. To twentysomethings, "Just Do It" is more than a slogan for sneakers. They do end runs around the system, caring little about convention. Nelson and Cowan walked away from political jobs in Washington and entry into law schools last summer to start Lead or Leave--the idea was drafted on a napkin one morning over coffee--a campaign to try to make the national debt a "Vietnam-type" issue for busters. With an in-your-face style typical of their peers, the group asked candidates for national office to promise to commit political suicide--to leave office in 1996--if the deficit is not cut in half by then. Over 100, including Ross Perot, took "the Pledge." Only a meager 17 got elected, and Clinton dismissed it as "a gimmick." Still, in some races, like the Georgia Senate race, the pledge became an issue. And this week's rally to demand means testing of Social Security got tacit encouragement from some Clinton officials seeking political support for such cuts. Says Nelson, "Politicians are saying, 'Don't worry, we're taking care of you.' We have the feeling that someone is not telling us the truth."
They rewrite the rules. Twentysomethings have little use for anything that gets in the way of problem solving. Wendy Kopp took on the teaching establishment when she started Teach For America. School boards and teachers' unions demanded that teachers get certification--which usually means taking education classes not always available or enticing to the nation's brightest liberal arts students. Kopp's corps members learn to teach largely on the job by sharing experiences and strategies with fellow corps teachers and advisers. Teach For America started as an idea in Kopp's senior thesis at Princeton University in 1989. Today, more than 100 corporate sponsors have donated $19 million, and 1,800 young teachers have been placed in underserved inner-city and rural schools. Kopp's goal is to help start a public-education revolution by infusing troubled schools with idealistic teachers who, for the rest of their lives, will argue that "the American dream isn't a reality" for children deprived of an "equal opportunity to obtain a quality education." She also hopes to strip superfluous credentialing from the teacher certification process.
They are masters of technology. "We use computers the way other generations use the telephone," explains Christina Thomas, 23, who, along with John Halbert, 26, is starting Generation X, a Washington-based "trade association" for twentysomethings that will use coast-to-coast computer mail networks to exchange ideas and build support for national legislation like youth service.
For the first generation to have grown up using personal computers, technology has truly made the world a global village. Matthew Lorin, 27, recently started the Student Human Rights Exchange, known as SHARE, collecting businesses' outdated computers and distributing them to students on college campuses in Moscow and the United States, along with free computer time on the international Peacenet. Next on his hookup: Mongolia, Cambodia and Liberia. Lorin says the global network will let students in politically troubled countries keep in touch with an international student human rights network. "Information is power," says Lorin, "and we know how to access it."
Political guerrilla warfare can be waged with little cash in an era of computers and cable television. Computer desktop publishing has created a twentysomething publishing renaissance, from the colorful and erratically published 'zines that chronicle youth culture to more thoughtful journals of opinion. Young journalists who sparked a rise of independent campus newspapers, like David Bernstein, 25, who edits the conservative Diversity & Division, are now starting similar publications often in their free time and out of one-bedroom apartments and basements. Eric Liu, 24, who by day works for a Democratic senator, started The Next Progressive in 1991 "out of frustration with all the negative press our generation was getting."
They are world travelers. The nation's most well-traveled youths ever are applying knowledge from their vision-building journeys overseas or around the United States. After spending a college apprenticeship traveling the back roads of Appalachia with a West Virginia midwife, Melissa Vine, 23, last summer started the Birth Partner Project, an Ohio-based peer counseling program for first-time pregnant Appalachian teenagers. Similarly, disabled actor Mitch Longley, 27, last fall gave up a steady role on the TV soap opera "Another World" to start Sowoho, a group dedicated to buying wheelchairs and other rehabilitation equipment for Third World and native American children. He saw the need following a 1990 trip to Egypt.
Nor do world boundaries intimidate a generation of men and women experienced in hopping on jets and exploring strange lands. Scott Alexander, 27, had never been to Eastern Europe before he began the European Journalism Network. To Alexander, who had started an independent conservative newspaper at Vassar College, the democracy movements in Eastern Europe struck him as "the most remarkable thing for my generation" and he wanted to be a part of it. Last year, on a shoestring budget of $80,000 from the Madison Center for Learning in Washington, he moved to Prague to teach students at five universities in the Czech and Slovak republics and in Hungary how to publish provocative campus newspapers. Articles have dug up professors' old, embarrassing statements and acts of allegiance to now discredited communist regimes. The for-profit papers are, in effect, laboratories of capitalism, training not only Eastern Europe's future journalists, figures Sullivan, but "the future politicians and business leaders, too."
They value cultural diversity. The post-baby-boom generation will ultimately include the highest percentage of naturalized U.S. citizens of any generation born in the 20th century. Their numbers have helped bring Asians and Hispanics to new prominence and encouraged campus emphasis on multiculturalism.
New York biochemist Sonserai Lee, 29, started the nonprofit Knowledge Recovery Foundation, to preserve indigenous medicinal practices. The Korean-born daughter of two doctors (her father practices both Oriental and Western medicine), Lee has built a computer repository of ancient-but-dying-out knowledge from Mayan healers to Chinese herbalists. Lee hopes her "bridge of information" may one day help scientists develop new antipregnancy drugs or find the elusive cure for crack addiction.
They seek service to community. The Vietnam generation idealistically thought it could change the world. But the post-boom generation focuses more realistically on easing smaller, community problems. "Young people sometimes think problems are so big that they can't do anything about them," says Vanessa Kirsch, 27, who started Public Allies, a national youth apprenticeship program. "But they think if I can just do something in my neighborhood, to work at a nearby nursing home or help out at a soup kitchen, I can make a difference." Polls show a recent, steady increase in voluntarism, which David Battey, 29, who started the national Youth Volunteer Corps, says is a backlash to the materialism of the Greedy '80s. "People in our generation want to do something they can believe in," he says.
Among the most community minded are minority youths who have reaped the benefits of post-civil-rights-era opportunities. Many, like recent Harvard medical school graduate Cheryl Dorsey, 29, see the vacuum of opportunities offered other minorities and devise their own solutions. Dorsey started the Family Van, a mobile health unit that drives around Boston's poor Roxbury and Mattapan neighborhoods where residents often have no transportation to clinics and hospitals. Michael Canul, 23, started a program to take minority kids in San Jose, especially those from gangs, around to university campuses to get them thinking about going to college. Public schools, because of budget reductions, have cut back on counselors. So many students "don't know about financial aid, many have never heard of the SAT," says Canul, whose mentors walk students through the application process. "There is a real, future social cost to not getting involved," he says.
The new service ethic is entrepreneurial, notes Ed Cohen, 50, whose venture-capital firm started the Echoing Green Foundation, which, although small, has become the pre-eminent funding catalyst for the twentysomething nonprofit groups like those begun by Kopp and Kirsch, as well as giving out fellowships to help innovators like Dorsey and Canul. "In the '60s these people would have gone into government," says Cohen. "Now they are inventing their own institutions to change the world."
They are post-partisan: Ronald Reagan was the first president these young people learned to love. The 18-to-24 age group was Reagan's strongest in the 1984 election. But George Bush did not hold the group's affection. This year young people were attracted primarily to Bill Clinton (21 percent of his total came from 18-to-29-year-olds), who, like Reagan, represented change. "We're very impatient with those who simply talk, talk, talk and do not deliver on their rhetoric," says Watson, who decided to perform his own little political revolt.
In drafting the Bill of Rights, Founding Father James Madison included a constitutional amendment to prohibit a Congress from giving itself a pay raise. States failed to ratify it, but 192 years later Watson, researching a college paper, discovered that Congress never set an expiration date and, in part to spite the professor who gave him a C grade, began a nationwide crusade to complete ratification. His 10-year letter-writing campaign to state legislators ended last May when Michigan approved the amendment, providing the three quarters of the states needed to add it to the Constitution.
They will wage intergenerational war. Although somewhat suspicious of their well-organized grandparents who benefit from Social Security and Medicare, twentysomethings are particularly cynical about boomers. They see them as insufferably self-righteous yuppies who sold out their principles, placed work over family and money making over community. "Our parents are the Charlton Hestons and Lee Remicks. We love them and don't want to be rude to them," says Douglas Coupland, 31, whose novel, "Generation X," is a generational totem. "But when boomers are in charge, watch out, you better put an electric fence around Fort Knox," he warns. Other intergenerational resentments are more personal. "Many [baby] bust adults think baby boomers may have had more fun than they're having. They took good jobs, got houses before housing prices took off, and they dominate culture," says Brad Edmondson of American Demographics magazine. In addition, boomers grew up before AIDS made love and sex more troublesome.
Despite the common experiences that bind twentysomethings, sometimes class and educational identities run stronger than generational ones, notes Stuart Himmelfarb of Collegetrack, a division of the Roper Organization. Many poor and poorly educated twentysomethings lack the sense that they can ever repair their own lives, much less be part of some noble Repair Generation.
Still, what makes the Repair Generation so potentially powerful is that its members are coming to understand that they share a generational identity that can be used as a weapon to reclaim the American Dream. Only by banding together, argues Strauss, will twentysomethings be able to change a nation's course and demand "older generations stop living off their future."
Their parents had the highest divorce rate in history. They are less prepared for college. Busters will inherit the worst public debt in U.S. history. Immigration makes them America's most ethnically diverse generation. They delay marriage far longer than did those under 30 in the 1970s. When they were kids, child-abuse cases jumped fourfold.
'For young people, voting is not the first thing that comes to mind as useful political participation.'
Vanessa Kirsch, 27, Founder of Public Allies
'We are holding the ideals of the '60s and combining them with the practical savvy of the '80s. We are pragmatic, nonideological. We take what really works.'
Eric Liu, 24, Editor of the Next Progressive.
'Instead of standing on the sidelines attacking teh system, we are working for change from within, with public- and private-sector support.'
Wendy Kopp, 25, creator of Teach for America
'The only time people listen to our generation is when we're in their face. The deficit is destroying our future. We're not going to be quiet.'
John Cowan, 27, Rob Nelson, 29, Founders of Lead or Leave
'There is an emphasis on communication. Our generation grew up afraid that our parents would divorce.'
Matthew Lorin, 27, launched Student Human Rights Exchange
'Lobbies have left our children in the cold. Survival of the fittest has been the order of the day.'
Cheryl Dorsey, 29, started the Family Van
'We are not only losing our natural environment, but the indigineous cultures that can teach us how to use medicinal plants.'
Sonserai Lee, 29, established Knowledge Recovery Foundation
'Whether we're African-American or Mexican-American, those of us who had opportunities have an obligation to try to help others.'
Michael Canul, 23, created mentoring program.
GRAPHIC Picture |c Vanessa Kirsch, |s Jeffrey MacMillan--USN≀ Picture |c Eric Liu, |s Charlie Archambault--USN≀ Picture |c Wendy Kopp, |s Jeffrey MacMillan--USN≀ Picture |c John Cowan, Rob Nelson, |s Linda L. Creighton--USN≀ Picture |c Matthew Lorin, |s Jeffrey MacMillan--USN≀ Picture |c Cheryl Dorsey, |s Nubar Alexanian for USN≀ Picture |c Sonserai Lee, |s Jeffrey MacMillan--USN≀ Picture |c Michael Canul |s Wesley Wong for USN&WR
This story appears in the February 22, 1993 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.