Today's teenagers and college students--the soc-called "echo boomers"--have been bred into conformity. Even worse, it's a privileged conformity. They revere authority and expect to be handsomely rewarded for it. So we are told by social psychologists, who also point out that this wave of teens is rich--they have more disposable income than any other sector of the population except the elderly. They tend to be blase about sex and drugs from an early age. They believe in going along with the group. They place no high value on originality or free-thinking.
In their own nascent way, this newest generation could become the next right-wing, not because they believe in an ideology but because they put their own comfort first and foremost. Yet there's a touching vulnerability in kids raised in a protected environment from infancy onward, with every day tightly scheduled, every activity closely shepherded by adults.
One can never predict how a generation will turn out, so it's good to notice the positive trends. Echo boomers are color-blind and regard inter-racial dating without anger or prejudice. They are tolerant of gays and believe in equality for women. They are against war (this is mostly a passive belief; they don't fight for peace, either.) They are technologically savvy, as befits a generation born with personal computers.
What this says, paradoxically, is that just as American idealism is on the decline, the struggles of past idealists--for civil rights, peace, and feminism--has worked. The echo boomers listened. At long last we have raised children who don't judge others by skin color or sexual preference. But at the same time, being children of privilege, they have no basis for idealism themselves. This makes them vulnerable to the toxic reactionaries preaching from the government and the pulpit.
It's distressing to think that our young people will consider the Iraqi war as an extended video game in which one can antiseptically bomb a civilian population with high-tech weapons. (Don't expect these kids to grow up and abolish the vast military complex and arms dealers.) It's distressing that they can feel comfortable about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo because either no one mentioned the subject or these horrors passed into oblivion without consequences. Young people by and large didn't respond en masse to Katrina. They didn't vote against the Iraqi war in numbers greater than older generations. We hear no widespread protests from the young about dying coral reefs and greenhouse gases. (They are aware of the environment, though, and anxious about terrorism.)
The absence of ideals allows ideologues and fanatics to fill the vacuum. That's what Yeats meant when he wrote about a generation where "the best lack all convictions and the worst are full of passionate intensity." The right wing has successfully conditioned young people, like the public at large, to call progressivism "extreme." And these young people abhor extremism--no one wants to be dropped from the pack. So, for good and ill, children will listen. They already have.
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