ENC1102 - Paper Two
July 9th, 2009
We hear a great deal about the baby-boom generation, and what kind of change this era ushered in as the residual traditions of the 19th century gave way to an early form of modernism. By the 1960’s a small but vocal vanguard of young adults had broken into the headlines by pushing religious morality to the curb. They had turned liberalism into a pastime, and by the 1970’s the parents of these youth had ceded defeat and granted this movement a reluctant place within mainstream America. Most of the norms left over from the first half of the century had not only been rejected, but also ridiculed, and yet the most dramatic change came just as the sun was setting on the 20th century. By creating the Internet and inventing cell phones, baby-boomers created a tsunami of even greater change, and it was a change that they themselves would resist. Within the time it took for the baby-boom generation to go from being parents to grand-parents, and in spite of the best efforts by the religious majority within their generation, the demand for an even more expansive form of global open-mindedness was a welcome by-product as the baby-boom generation soon found themselves pushed out of their comfort zone by the technology that they themselves created.
When the Iranian election was completed and the opposition party realized that there was a stark contrast between the announced results and the polling leading up to the election, a protest quickly mounted, but that in and of itself was not the big story. The power brokers of every struggling democracy all had a playbook for how to handle rigged elections, but that playbook did not tell them how to deal with cell phones with video technology and Internet access to Twitter. When the governing elite started to monitor the traffic on local Internet servers, the opposition party stepped in, as reported on June 22, 2009 by Jaikumar Vijayan. “Since
post-election unrest began in Iran about a week ago, supporters of the Iranian opposition movement have been propagating lists of available proxy servers to Iranians via Twitter and numerous Web sites” (Vijayan). According to the article, proxy servers were donated by sympathizers in 87 countries around the world, and the flood of contraband media continued in bursts of 140 character Twitter posts. The information curtain around Iran had been dismantled while nobody was looking and the global community had truly been flattened. As a result, the world bore witness as a 26-year-old martyr named Neda became the global symbol of why the Islamic regime must be toppled (Neda Iran). A corrupt political puppet may have stolen this election from the Iranian people, but history will show that he will never again control the Iranian people. Technology has already given them a viable version of the democracy that they crave.
In the 1950’s, the equivalent of the recent news story from Iran would have likely been found in Section C of the newspaper, and back then very few young people would even give the front page anything more than a passing glance. International politics and concern for the humanities, as it related to young people, was in the realm of the students at liberal arts colleges, but it was like preaching to the choir. For the few families with the novelty called television, the sizable investment had been made primarily for its entertainment value. The majority of Americans lived in rural cities and towns and the talk at the local post office was primarily of a local flavor. The appetite for global news seldom had room for anything more than one story at a time and in the late 1950’s that story would have been the events that lead up to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. By the end of the 20th century, however, that had all changed, as reported in the following 1999 essay by Eugene M. Lang:
"Like all colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges in recent decades have also been obliged to cope with burgeoning external forces – new and challenging frontiers of knowledge and communications, dramatic new learning tools, maintenance and obsolescence, global considerations, increasingly diverse constituencies and their growing service demands. Thoughtful responses to these forces have rarely come easily or uncontested. Responses are tempered by the need to surmount barriers of academic process and prerogative, sensitivity to relationships with peer colleges, costs and financing, internal conflicts over the allocation of resources, strong individual biases, and the viscosities of tradition" (Lang).
Still the vanguards of change, the liberal arts colleges continue to push the envelope, but they are no longer doing it alone. As Lang reported, any kind of change still has to deal with “strong individual biases” and “viscosities of tradition,” and as much as the baby-boomers themselves brought about enormous change in the 1960’s and 70’s they are now the force that have their own biases and want to retain their own traditional ways, such as they are.
Resistance to change is a natural reaction by most people once they reach middle age and feel the nesting instinct settling in. In much the same way that an abused spouse will refuse to leave an abusive relationship, some people, as they get older, tend to prefer the familiar over the unknown. Middle-age is usually a period of reflection and it feels natural to long for the traditions of the past that are now seen to be at risk of being lost, but some traditions need to be lost. Writing about cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote “[a] creed that disdains the partialities of kinfolk and community may have a past, but it has no future” (Appiah 16). Fundamentalist religious traditions that are based upon a literal interpretation of the Abrahamic texts are at the top of that list. These are the traditions that are at the root of conflict in the Middle-East, and here at home they are at the root of many of our own all-too-familiar hate crimes. We also continue to live with past legislation that has at its core a desire to hold onto those “partialities of kinfolk and community.”
One hot-button issue for the baby-boomer generation is how to regulate scientific progress. Every major study on the topic predicts that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease will affect literally millions of baby-boomers, and stem cell research promises ground-breaking progress in the fight against these and many other afflictions associated with aging. Still, it was primarily due to the support from the religious traditions of the “boomers” and their parents that inspired President George W. Bush to block this research under the last White House administration. Neoconservative author Francis Fukuyama, before his conversion to more liberal views, warned that “…while an embryo can be assigned a lower moral status than an infant, it has a higher moral status than other kinds of cells or tissue that scientists work with. It is therefore reasonable, on nonreligious grounds, to question whether researchers should be free to create, clone, and destroy human embryos at will” (Fukuyama 105). Although Fukuyama tried to frame his argument as “nonreligious,” from a strictly humanitarian viewpoint it is hard to argue against the need to utilize every available resource to end the human suffering brought on by Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Besides, the debate at the time was primarily about using tissue from umbilical cords that were destined for the incinerator in the first place. If we think of religion as a “community” and of their religious beliefs as their “traditions,” then one can quickly see that Fukuyama was kidding himself to even think that any break from the “traditional ways” here in America could ever be thought of as being anything but religious, but that is the foundation for a completely different debate.
As impossible as it is to leave religion out of the discussion, if we can just look at things from a completely humanitarian point of view we will see that in the current global community that we now live, most people, even young people, are aware of human rights violations and the threat of war in almost every corner of the planet. Even if they are not well versed in any more than one topic, most will be able to tell you about North Korea firing missiles, Iran’s election protests, the status of our withdrawal from Iraq, and at least one or two other media events outside of our borders. Here at home, almost everybody will be able to form an opinion on what the most pressing concerns for President Barack Obama should be, and almost every living registered voter in America under the age of 30 had been on an email list for one of the candidates during the 2008 presidential election. It was Albert-László Barabási, a renowned scientist, network researcher, and author, who wrote that, “The global village we’ve grown used to inhabiting is a new reality for humans” (Barabási 29). The aging parents of the baby-boomers, who are likely in their 80’s now, are probably restricting their media consumption to a newspaper and the six o’clock news to help them formulate their opinions. Most would have to have their children or grandchildren set up the satellite or cable converter box if they wanted to get a 24-hour news channel on their TV, but those same grandchildren will not have the luxury of restricting their intake of information. In spite of their best efforts, they will not be able to escape a world that is drowning them with information, but the good news is, no longer are there filters determining which information gets through. The emerging leaders of tomorrow are able to graze freely and quench their thirst for news without a concern for what the old media moguls feel is the message that should be printed or broadcast. This kind of change is good for humanity.
Two generations ago the power to communicate a message of tolerance was stifled by a small group of conservative elitists. In order to capture a headline the protests had to be large enough to block streets and fill the Washington Mall. Organizers had to rely upon tightly knit word-of-mouth communities like the liberal arts universities in order to gain any traction at all. Today, the media elite have been bypassed by private blogs and Internet celebrities who have enormous followings. As much as the mainstream media wanted to focus on Michael Jackson’s follies and the controversies of his life, the majority of Americans did not buy into the veracity of any of that reporting. Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolf said it best when he wrote, “what you would have inferred is that no one liked MJ, everybody thought he was a complete weirdo that he was written-off, marginalized, absolutely forgotten" (Gorenstein). It seems that the opposite was true.
Today we have a congress that in increasingly populated with the children of the baby-boom generation and this congress was elected in part by the largest voting block of first-time voters in this country’s history. One of these congressmen, Rep. Patrick Murphy, who was the first elected Iraq War veteran in 2007 and was just 33 years old while campaigning, stood up on July 8th, 2009 and announced a bill to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Known as DADT, the 1993 law prevents gays and lesbians from self-identifying if they want to serve in the military, and it is the kind of law that perfectly reflects the thinking that Appiah targeted in his writing when he talked about “[a] creed that disdains the partialities of kinfolk and community.” In announcing his new bill, Rep. Murphy said, “Attitudes on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in the military and among Americans have shifted a great deal since 1993. Up to 75% of Americans support repeal, and the number is even higher among young people ages 18-29, the age bracket of our youngest soldiers” (Murphy).
This is now an era when two people can come up with an idea for a web domain and with a few emails the idea can go viral. Three days after the November 4th, 2008 defeat of Prop 8 in California (and similar constitutional amendments in Arizona and Florida,) two friends discussed an idea for a new web site. Within 24 hours a domain called
http://jointheimpact.com had been registered and city organizers started registering their events on the site. On November 15th a National Day of Protest was held in 300 cities around the world. Literally millions of people assembled that day at city halls, state capitals, and other in every progressive democracy on the planet (Join the Impact). It was a far cry from the Stonewall Riots of 1969.
The undeclared victory has already been awarded to humanism as technology continues to grant a voice to the oppressed and lays bare the false messages of oppressors who crave nothing more than to hold on to their positions of privilege, positions that could only be retained if they could continue to validate the foolish religions and traditions that granted them their power in the first place. These oppressors no longer control the message, and their demise is now only a matter of time.
Works CitedVijayan, Jaikumar, “Proxy servers pressed into action to keep Web access in Iran.” ComputerWorld.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9134653/Proxy_servers_pressed_into_action_to_keep_Web_access_in_Iran 22 Jun 2009, 9 July 2009.
Neda Iran.
http://nedairan.com/content/about-neda 7 July 2009.
Lang, Eugene M., "Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges," Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Winter 1999, Vol. 128, No. 1.
Barabási, Albert-László, “Six Degrees of Separation.” Emerging – A Reader 2nd ed. Ed. Barclay Barrios. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. (17-30).
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton, 2006.
Gorenstein, Peter, “America's Love Affair with Michael Jackson: The Mainstream Media Gets It Wrong (Again),”
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/274860/America's-Love-Affair-with-Michael-Jackson--The-Mainstream-Media-Gets-It-Wrong-(Again);_ylt=AszKy172.6dGB0B46MeZQLtl7ot4?tickers=twx,cbs,nws,yhoo,aapl,ge,dis , 7 July 2009, 9 July 2009.
Murphy, Patrick, “Press Conference Statement – July 8, 2009.”
http://www.hrc.org/sites/voicesofhonor/pdfs/Patrick_Murphy-Press_Conference-07-08-09.pdf 9 July 2009.
Join the Impact.
http://jointheimpact.com/about-us . 7 July 2009.
