The Mission of Generation Z
How we, alongside millennials and Gen. Alpha, can help future generations grow up in a healthier world
“You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”
How many of us had those words drilled into our heads in elementary school? How many of us were coldly told by adults that “life’s not fair” and to therefore stop complaining about whatever way in which we had been treated unjustly? How many “grown-ups” showed us that they cared not about principle or doing the right thing, but merely their own power and maintaining order?
I would bet that a vast majority of Gen. Z’ers have a story of being treated in a way that no self-respecting person should tolerate. The kind of adult responsible for this treatment, of course, does not think of kids as future grown-ups, but merely as permanently docile pawns to be moved around. Similarly, because this kind of adult does not think of themself as a former kid, they do not think back on their own childhood memories, and therefore assume that the kids under their supervision will also forget about their experiences once they do age to the point of being out of sight and out of mind. The key to making kids forget being mistreated is to instill in them a sense of hierarchy, in which adults are bestowed the right to hypocrisy in the form of flagrantly violating the rules that they expect kids to follow, i.e. “do as I say, not as I do.” Upon desensitization to this hierarchy, some kids then become self-enforcers of it, admonishing their own classmates to not complain about unfairness, as though hearing these complaints poses some kind of threat to them, in just the same way that the conservative Stockholm-syndrome ethos demands that “I suffered, so it’s only fair that you should too.” Repeating this mantra to oneself, however, doesn’t do much to assuage the wounds that being the recipient of mistreatment inflicts; if it did, American conservatives wouldn’t be among the angriest people on the planet. However, it can serve to entrench one’s conservative beliefs, which I believe contributed directly to the so-called “alt-right pipeline” that radicalized millions across the internet around 2016.
We expect our kids to grow up and become the next leaders of a democratic society, but we force them to spend their childhood in an environment modeled on authoritarianism and obedience. I’m not saying I think kids should be allowed to do whatever they want; there is obviously a place for adults to instill a sense of conscience and responsibility (which is of course why the far right is bent on dismantling education as we know it, given the well-established inverse correlation between education levels and bigotry). My argument is that the model of education as it stands, especially in public schools, does not accomplish this goal, making it all the more impressive that my age peers have been at the forefront of the fight for social justice. However, I will also be exploring the way in which many of the more toxic behaviors of our generation represent a failure of the education system, and something that we can learn from and do differently when it’s our turn. The core ideal of the progressive movement — having a better society in the future — depends on the kids of today, so we have to explore ways in which we could better prepare them to build that society.
Foundational Years
Because the majority of kids in the United States attend a public school, it’s important to understand what the public school system thinks of as its goals. In 1852, Massachusetts passed a law requiring parents to send their children to a school (public or private), with every other state following suit by 1918, with the goal of producing a population that would be educated upon its arrival in the workforce, which was also meant to be delayed until adulthood with the abolition of child labor. If students had a proper grasp of the English language, mathematics and science, they would be better equipped to work as a journalist or as an engineer. During this 66-year period, illiteracy at age 14 dropped from >20% to 6%, putting the U.S. nearly on par with the United Kingdom, the superpower of the time. However, the quality of education received unsurprisingly corresponded to already existing inequities, as the doctrine of “separate but equal” in practice usually meant “separate and unequal.” This was rectified by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and initiatives such as desegregation bussing were promoted to attempt to bridge the racial divide, but, while effective in the short term, these did not solve the issue of disparities in access to resources, which was determined by property taxes in the school district. At the same time, I might speculate that as the nature of work changed and unionization rates plummeted, adequate preparation for the workforce came to mean a willingness to unquestioningly accept unjust orders with no if’s, and’s or but’s. In 2001, President Bush II signed the infamous No Child Left Behind Act, which further tied schools’ access to resources to the performance of their students on standardized tests, punishing underperforming schools by withholding their funding in a move that seems almost calculated to exacerbate inequity. With this financial incentive to produce high test scores, and the adoption of a “Common Core” curriculum to better tease out school-specific factors in students’ test results, preparation for these tests in many places crowded out other “less important” enrichment activities, such as music and art classes.
When I attended a public school considered one of the best in New York City from first through fourth grade (i.e. 2008 to 2012), it was patently clear how large the standardized tests loomed in the minds of the administrators. Sometimes after the tests were finished, there didn’t seem to be much curriculum for the remainder of the school year, as we sat in third grade one day learning how to make corn dolls and how to spell the word “bed.” However, this was far from the extent of the school’s failure to prepare us to function as responsible people, as various adults modeled behavior that even the parents of me and my friends considered mean. The most egregious example I can think of is when my first grade teacher, who I’ll call Ms. T. in the interest of avoiding a defamation lawsuit, brought us up to the playground on the roof in order to watch another class of kids having fun, as a punishment for our misbehavior. This same “teacher,” on a day when my mom and I were running down the hallway in the morning to get to the classroom before being considered late, heard us running and asked one of her “teacher’s pets” who it was, and upon hearing that it was me, told this other student to close the door in my face so that I would have to walk all the way to the principal’s office to pick up a late pass. Ms. T. also singled me out in front of the class for using Roman numerals on a multiplication exercise, did not allow me to read above an “M-level” despite my readiness to do so and the presence of N-level books on the bookshelf that were simply higher than she could reach, and promoted a gender binary in which the proper way for girls to sit was cross-legged, and that after giving a presentation, we should “bow, or curtsy if you’re a girl.” This is just a sample of the many examples I can cite of the toxicity of that classroom, which Ms. T. presumably assumed I would have forgotten by now.
Two years later, while participating in an afterschool program called Wingspan, we were brought on a field trip to the ice-skating rink at Bryant Park, during which we were expected to remain absolutely silent while riding the subway, which was an understandable rule. The only problem was, as adults are so fond of doing, our chaperones did not care about ascertaining who had actually broken the rule and for what reason. When another student kept trying to talk to me, rather than be rude and just pretend that I didn’t hear, I told them to be quiet, which you might think would have represented exemplary behavior in the adults’ eyes. But all they heard was me talking, which meant that I had to receive a lecture upon our return at the school on the importance of safety from the antagonistic bald Wingspan director, who never allowed me to get a word in and simply walked away once he was done correcting this perceived delinquency. The words that I would really like to say in response to this treatment are not fit to print here, but if anyone who works with kids is reading this, just know that this is how to make them see you as an arch-villain comparable to those in their favorite cartoons. Let me repeat myself. If your response to a kid trying to help another follow the rules and avoid getting in trouble is to attempt to make that kid ashamed of themself, you don’t care about setting a good example or raising the next generation of citizens. You care about jumping to conclusions and bullying people half your size to reassure your own adult insecurities.
The next year wasn’t nearly as bad, as my class’s teacher, who I’ll call Ms. D., maintained a relatively peaceful environment for most of the year, but became significantly harsher towards the end of the year, which one of my classmates speculated was because parent-teacher conferences were over. Despite telling us on many occasions that talking back to her was unacceptable, Ms. D. was actually called out once for talking back to a disruptive student, to which she responded that “he needed to be talked back to.” On one day when we were doing a typing exercise using portable keyboard devices, I had the mistaken impression that the exercise wasn’t over, and told this to one of my friends who asked me if it was. When I turned out to be wrong, this teacher leaned over to my friend and told her, not quietly enough for me not to overhear, to “listen to me, not Dylan,” as though I represented a threat to her authority. Ms. D. also claimed that the reason we had to say the Pledge of Allegiance was because Mayor Bloomberg had requested it, going against the New York State law whereby teachers have to suggest that students say the Pledge, but cannot require that they do. In addition, at the end of each school year, we would write letters supposedly for the grade below us about our favorite things that we had done that year, but when we were doing this in fourth grade, one of my friends asked why we had never received a letter from the grade above (a question I was ashamed not to have thought of), to which there was no clear answer given, maybe revealing why it was heavily implied that we were expected to write positive things in our letters.
Throughout this whole time, the school administration was unreceptive to feedback from my family, who wanted me to be exposed to more challenging math and science, and who disliked the general one-size-fits-all approach that the standardized tests exemplified. For these reasons, we decided that for fifth grade I would transfer to a newly opening private school in Chelsea.
A Fall from Grace
At this point, it becomes relevant to consider the question of who education is meant for. On paper, it presents itself as being for everyone, but many people have found this to not line up with their personal experience, often due to the socioeconomic categories into which they fall; for example, it’s not uncommon for girls to feel that the system is biased in favor of boys and vice versa. It can even be the case that the administrators’ actions make it clear that they see themselves as the primary beneficiaries of the education that they provide and not the students, with the latter having a responsibility to the former and not the other way around, as with the pressure for public school students to deliver high test scores. The sentiment of disenfranchisement and resentment that these factors can generate among students can lead to the toxification of a school’s entire community, which is something that I saw happen at the middle and high school that I attended.
To be clear, my experience at this private school was significantly better than at public school, and my family is fortunate that we had the resources to send me there. And for the first three years, when the idealism of its foundation had not yet worn off, it was an unforgettable, in many ways magical place, and I’m grateful for the friends I still have that I first met back then. However, in the spring of 2015, its founder left (or was pushed out of) the organization, and on the first day of eighth grade, it was clear just from the atmosphere, or the vibes if you will, that something was wrong. First of all, late passes were introduced, which I saw as an enormously insulting reminder of my public school days. The start time was also moved fifteen minutes earlier (to 8:15am), but we were only allowed to use one of the building’s four elevators to get to our part of the building (seven/eight floors upstairs) before 8am, since after that it was reserved for the lower schoolers, with no allowances made for if you had been in line for the elevator when the clock hit eight. A teacher whom I had appreciated in my sixth grade history class took advantage of this rule by riding to the first floor with a camera pointed at the elevator door, which caused a stampede of students in the other direction when it opened. In addition, due to the recently opened nature of the institution, they were frequently changing their minds on things, such as telling us just before the beginning of the school year that we would be allowed to wear backpacks (which had not been the case previously) and have recess, but then retracting this decision upon our actual return. These factors among others made it more difficult to place faith in their often idealistic initiatives, which would never be referred to again if they were canceled.
At the same time, the school was undergoing the accreditation process, and was eager to prove that it was just as rigorous as its competitors across New York City. To this end, I clearly remember teachers becoming less accommodating of students’ extenuating circumstances, with my homeroom teacher referring to the SHSAT exam, which many of my friends were taking for their high school applications, as an “extra activity,” likely motivated by wanting to keep students from going elsewhere for high school. (This mirrors the experience of one of my siblings, whose school tended to significantly increase students’ workloads at 10th grade, and then blame the students for being unprepared for it.) My English teacher in particular represented the pinnacle of uncompromising strictness that viewed encountering difficulty with the material (e.g. not having insightful enough annotations) as a moral failing, where the material in question consisted of badly written personal narratives with an occasional Of Mice and Men thrown in. On the other hand, support for more STEM-oriented students such as myself and my friends was largely non-existent, as math classes were deliberately mixed in terms of skill level, with the idea that more advanced students would basically spend their time helping to teach their less advanced classmates. When I got bored of doing this one day after 45 minutes spent stuck on a single problem and pulled out a copy of The Martian, my independent reading book that I had chosen for English, the math teacher (who was otherwise a nice person) wordlessly walked over and confiscated it. To the extent that there was support for more advanced math as a supplement to the main curriculum, access to it was arbitrarily restricted on social bases, as a special section was created for most of my friend group, unofficially referred to as the “Nerd Squad,” but excluding one of my female friends who was instead put in a less advanced section and simply given extra work to compensate (which the teacher of that section knew wasn’t advanced enough, but couldn’t do anything about), ostensibly so that she “wouldn’t have to deal with being around the rowdy guys.” Some months later, when the SHSAT results came out, several teachers apparently asked her to consider remaining for high school, in response to which she summarized her sentiment as follows: “You didn’t support me when I needed it, so why would I put my faith in you when you want me to stay?”
As mentioned above, this represented a whiplash-inducing departure from the way in which the school had been run even the previous year, leaving a profound impact on part of the Nerd Squad, which started out like the stereotype of the glasses-wearing bookworm and ended up more like the frat-brother protagonists of Revenge of the Nerds (1984). To understand what happened to them and why they ultimately turned to the alt-right pipeline, we have to start from the previous year, seventh grade, when two important things happened: we had a math teacher who I’ll call Ms. K., and we became part of the online gaming community, specifically, that of none other than the infamously toxic League of Legends. From our point of view, Ms. K. would engage in blatant favoritism, tending to call on girls significantly more often than boys, and if boys were the only ones with their hands raised, she might simply explain the material herself, since “no one had their hands raised” (although my aforementioned female friend disagreed with this perception of the teacher, having gotten to know her as a homeroom advisor and seeing her as having been unfairly misunderstood and vilified). Even though Ms. K. actually left the school after spring break, several members of the Nerd Squad got in significant trouble in April that year, when an in-joke at the expense of one of us had gotten out of hand and my mom convinced me to turn us in before the individual in question did, which led my friends to blow up at me in response and to develop a sense of being unjustly targeted by the administration.
At the same time, being part of the gamer community meant that the Nerd Squad was exposed to openly bigoted YouTubers such as LeafyIsHere, whose criticism of so-called “SJW’s” (caricatures of blue-haired “social justice warriors” crusading to purify college campuses of opposing viewpoints) felt relatable at a time when, continuing into eighth grade, some of the more liberal faculty were from our point of view displaying preferential behavior towards non-white-male students, presumably as a sort of unofficial affirmative action, which felt connected to the school’s clear preference for the humanities over STEM. This was, of course, especially the case for those of the Nerd Squad who had conservative parents (some of whom had emigrated from the former Soviet Union, and were therefore suspicious of left-wing ideologies), who were also pressuring them to perform well academically in order to get into a good high school so that they could go to a good college. This snowballed even further in November 2015 when a student was suspended for rapping the N-word in a song from Straight Outta Compton at a birthday party in the presence of a Black student, who was seen as a snitch for getting the involvement of teachers for something that happened outside of school, and two more were suspended for making a poor-taste joke about how the Mandarin word nei-ge, meaning “that,” (mentioned in the previous article of this series), sounds like the other word. (For his part, this Black friend didn’t think the others were going to get suspended, and when I took his side, they saw me as acting like a teacher.) It’s well known by now that the alt-right pipeline feeds on frustrated young men who feel isolated and ignored but haven’t developed the emotional resources to fully understand why, and given that their needs were being disregarded both at home and at school, where they felt that they were being seen as oppressors by their own teachers, it’s no surprise that many of the Squad explicitly supported the candidacy of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
With this being the case, you may naturally be wondering, how come I bothered to stay friends with them if they were being drawn to the far right and I was not? The answer is that ultimately, I didn’t, but it took me until almost the end of 2017 to fully realize that our years of shared memories prior to eighth grade no longer made for a sufficient basis for a viable friendship. During the time leading up to then, I found it within myself to turn a blind eye to their problematic rhetoric and actions, because I still thought they were good people with whom I simply disagreed on some things. Besides that, telling them off would have come at a high social price, as demonstrated by the two incidents I recounted (in April and November 2015). And, as I’ve so far spent the last 1,400 words telling you, I shared many of their grievances at the school administration, as well as at our perception of society as a whole, which strengthened our bonds significantly. This actually leads me to a key point, which I believe is essential for leftists and progressives to understand as we attempt to combat the far-right propaganda machine: People want to find reasons for their suffering, and that can make them just as receptive to bigoted lies as to well-reasoned truth. When LeafyIsHere told my 13/14-year-old friends that their problems were because of feminists and not the people who designed the high school application process, it was no different than when Trump tells millions of white boomers that their problems are because of the woke mob and not the exploitative capitalist system upon which this country operates. Despite the claims of conservative commentators that they represent the side of “logic” and “reason” (which played well to the Nerd Squad), the right depends just as much on emotion as the left, it’s just that the former manipulates this emotion to turn people against each other and offers no solutions to get to the root causes of people’s suffering.
After reading all of this, you may again be wondering, what was happening with the rest of our grade at this time? Our class had around 70 students after all, and the Nerd Squad only made up ten or fifteen of them. The answer is that many of them, as well as many of the ~90-strong class below us, were being exposed in significant quantities to tobacco and alcohol, given that, as you may have gathered by this point, the school’s discouragement of such activity did not exactly hold much moral weight. As is also the stereotype for middle school, they were also engaging in an ongoing competition to establish themselves as the coolest and most socially successful, which, in addition to the drugs, entailed demonstrating a base level of distaste for the academic institution. Whereas many adults would be content to see this as an unavoidable consequence of teenagehood, there is evidence that American adolescents are uniquely unhappy compared to their international counterparts, whose countries have figured out a way to help them navigate the transitions associated with this age in a healthier way. In a 2014 letter to the editor of The New York Times, psychologist Robert Epstein writes,
Studies have shown that about half of American teenagers meet the criteria for some form of mental illness, including anxiety disorders, but I disagree with Dr. Friedman that this is largely because of the properties of a teenage brain. That is a myth perpetuated by a handful of researchers, some of whom are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, which has successfully created a huge new market for psychoactive drugs by promoting the faulty “teenage brain” idea.
In more than 100 cultures around the world, teenage turmoil is absent; such cultures don’t even have a word for “adolescence.” If the teenage brain were responsible for the turmoil of our teenagers, we would see it everywhere. We don’t.
The turmoil of our teenagers is due entirely to societal practices that infantilize young people and isolate them from responsible adults, trapping them in the frivolous, media-controlled world of “teen culture.” Anthropological research also demonstrates that when Western schooling and media enter cultures where teenagers are highly functional, they typically take on all the pathological characteristics of American teenagers within a decade. The problem is our society, not the brain.
As middle school rolled into high school, a trend was widely noticed whereby each new class of incoming freshmen was more disengaged and disrespectful than their predecessors (with my class being seen as the “last good grade”); at least in part a direct result, in my view, of all of the factors I’ve discussed here of the management of the middle school, especially given the anecdotally better behavior of ninth graders who had attended middle school elsewhere as compared to those who had risen from the middle school. Let’s take a look at an account, provided by one of my friends, of the curious case of one such ninth grader in our class who was failed by the system around him:
For most of freshman year of High School, I had two best friends: M. and J. Similar to you, Dylan, much of my time spent with them was in the mindset of tolerate, tolerate, tolerate. I needed new friends since many of the ones from middle school had either ditched me or gone elsewhere on their search for a good education in New York which was becoming increasingly difficult to find.
I first started talking with M. walking back home from Chinese class together. Sooner or later he brought J. with him and all three of us hit it off. Like many fourteen year olds trying to better figure out who they were, we liked our fair share of getting ourselves into stupid shit.
Much of the fun and games slowed down when J. started drinking heavily and M. started pathologically lying to me. It finally came to a screeching halt when J. and M. awarded themselves “the incident” for that school year. In March, the three of us were sitting around a table in the temporary building across the street from campus. Some others were there too. J. and M. thought it would be funny to make appointments with people on Google Calendar and invite them to do obscene things. One of their victims, one of only a handful of Black students in senior year, was invited to “pull up and fight” with the N-word thrown somewhere in there.
The next day, J. got away with a three week suspension on a permanent record that would disappear given he didn’t have any more infractions by his junior year. As for M., [our school] employed a tactic many private schools in New York like to do when they want to dispose of a student discreetly: Blackmail. They sit you down in a room or on a phone call with your parents (who probably wouldn’t be there otherwise) and give you two equally horrible options: Either you withdraw your attendance from the school immediately with a clean record or we will expel you indefinitely citing your actions on your permanent record. Almost always, students opt for the withdrawal. But it’s not as easy as it looks because private school admissions reps talk, like a neural network, and everyone knows everyone’s business. Private schools and colleges know what it means to withdraw suddenly from a prestigious institution: You fucked up… bad.
What I haven’t mentioned is what made M.’s case “curious”: his history with the administration and his situation at home. For years [our school] had been trying to find a good enough excuse to get rid of him. He was disruptive in class and occasionally aggressive, not to mention coming to school reeking of weed. But institutions can’t just get rid of someone if they don’t like them, so they build a case — like stealing from a Wal-Mart where they kind of let you get away with the first two times so they can press the maximum amount of charges on the third and get their money’s worth. At his house, M. was dealing with a mother that recently passed away, an absent father that just remarried, financial instability, and a step-brother who he hated and who always tried to one-up him.
Of course, teachers and admins saw it only as drug use and irritability in the classroom. This left me confused; how can [our school] preach a holistic approach and a different kind of learning if they are dealing with misbehaving students in the same way private schools had been for decades? I expected the admins to turn a blind eye, but it really hurt when teachers did the same thing. I guess they didn’t know everything about M.’s personal issues, but they also never approached him to ask if anything was wrong when they obviously noticed it — which is the whole advantage of going to a private school in New York! In public schools, faculty can’t show anything remotely intimate or even touch students or they might be fired on the spot. I confronted both admins and faculty about M., careful not to defend his bigotry and racism that ultimately ended our friendship. When I gave context, it shut most of the adults up and then I would always get the same response: “Welp, nothing we can do now. Anyway…” But there were things you could’ve done. You had three fucking years to fix a problem you willfully ignored. My question is: How many students has [our school] done this to?
For what it’s worth, it’s also worth mentioning that J. was a very wealthy White kid with a condo on the Upper West Side overlooking the Hudson. M. was a Person of Color and wore the same pants to school almost every day. That should tell you everything you need to know.
Of course, the school administration saw themselves as promoting liberal values and helping to raise the next generation of global citizens, and I do have to credit them with creating a curriculum that provided a meaningfully deep investigation into social issues, as well as other accomplishments such as the creation of a travel program whereby teachers chaperoned students on two-week trips to various places around the world, and a program allowing students to pursue their own independent study projects in place of regular classes. I was fortunate enough to benefit from these programs, by traveling to China to learn about Buddhism, which gave me a new perspective on the nature of society and what we tend to think of as facts of life, and by traveling to Hawaii to learn about the conflict between the astronomical community, of which I am a member, and the indigenous Hawaiians, who have fought to protect their native land from what they see as colonial desecration in the form of the construction of new telescopes. As my independent project, I wrote a paper exploring the depiction of extraterrestrial life in American science fiction (specifically, Contact by Carl Sagan) as compared to Chinese science fiction (specifically, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin). I might not be writing this series if it were not for the opportunities I had during high school; it was in a particularly meaningful class in 12th grade that I was exposed to an excerpt from The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris (with whom I disagree on some issues) that helped me establish a more solid foundation for the worldview which I would here lay out:
The philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene has done some of the most influential neuroimaging research on morality. While Greene wants to understand the brain processes that govern our moral lives, he believes that we should be skeptical of moral realism on metaphysical grounds. For Greene, the question is not, “How can you know for sure that your moral beliefs are true?” but rather, “How could it be that anyone’s moral beliefs are true?” In other words, what is it about the world that could make a moral claim true or false? He appears to believe that the answer to this question is “nothing.”
However, it seems to me that this question is easily answered. Moral view A is truer than moral view B, if A entails a more accurate understanding of the connections between human thoughts/intentions/behavior and human well-being. Does forcing women and girls to wear burqas make a net positive contribution to human well-being? Does it produce happier boys and girls? Does it produce more compassionate men or more contented women? Does it make for better relationships between men and women, between boys and their mothers, or between girls and their fathers? I would bet my life that the answer to each of these questions is “no.” So, I think, would many scientists. And yet, as we have seen, most scientists have been trained to think that such judgments are mere expressions of cultural bias — and, thus, unscientific in principle. Very few of us seem willing to admit that such simple, moral truths increasingly fall within the scope of our scientific worldview.
It is this idea, that of a scientific basis on which to judge the merit of various models of human organization, that inspired my idea of a theory of civil society that I argued in favor of the need for in my first article two years ago. This makes it all the more ironic (but not surprising) that the values which the school administration sought to imbue in us were from time to time lacking from their own actions.
This was clearly seen when, in response to the devastating Parkland shooting in 2018, they allowed us to stage a walkout where we stood in silence on the street for seventeen minutes to represent the seventeen who lost their lives, but penalized students who chose to continue their protest in public instead of immediately returning to class afterwards, while publicizing the walkout on their social media with a close-up of students holding signs. The administration similarly required parental permission slips to participate in the September 2019 climate strike, in a way defeating the purpose of the protest (although this is more understandable given the liability associated with students traveling downtown to attend the rally led by Greta Thunberg in Battery Park, and teachers avoided scheduling anything important in class for that afternoon). There’s more that I could say, but cannot in good conscience print here in the knowledge that doing so would devalue the diplomas of the students currently there, and that it would also only hurt the teachers, who had no choice but to do what the administration asked of them.
The most profound betrayal came after the spring of 2020, when the Covid pandemic had robbed my class of an in-person graduation ceremony, in response to which members of my class overwhelmingly voted to forego a virtual ceremony in favor of planning an in-person one for such time as conditions would allow. The school promised to follow through on this, a promise that was broken a year later, while the (significantly larger) graduating class of 2021 received a ceremony that still managed to adhere to the remaining Covid regulations at the time. I know that for many people whose graduating classes consisted of several hundred students, a make-up ceremony was never possible in the first place, but for us, of whom there were only around 60, it would’ve been. In retrospect, this truly felt as though my class had been effectively expelled from the school community, left to be forgotten in the dustbin of anecdotal history, as though we had collectively committed some great crime justifying such treatment, as though the class of 2020 had never existed. But we did, and the pandemic failed to take our ability to make a difference in the world; it strengthened our resolve instead.
Finding Our Way
During the “Graduate Together” TV special that was put together for us and aired on May 16, 2020, President Obama reiterated the sentiment that we have heard from “adults” on many occasions, i.e. that our generation is going to have to clean up the mess that they are making. On one hand, I appreciate the idea of a youth-led movement delivering a wave of revitalization to America and the world, as failed systems present opportunities for new beginnings. On the other hand, I don’t know that any one among us does not resent the responsibility that has been forced upon us, and that history will not remember this as a colossal injustice by an entire generation of adults (boomers) towards their children and grandchildren. On top of that, we have to teach ourselves how to save the world, given that the efforts of well-meaning grown-ups to imbue us with good values in many cases fell flat for the reasons I’ve discussed above. However, there is a way in which we don’t have to figure it out entirely from scratch: We can learn from the example of what adults did with us and consciously strive to deviate from it, and become the advocates and leaders that we didn’t have.
There are many pitfalls that it will be important to avoid in order to do this well. In the previous article, I discussed the various authoritarian impulses to which progressives can be susceptible, such as a sense of responsibility to police the language of our peers, as though not doing so would represent a failure to stand up to oppression. Another example is the tendency to take extreme positions, such as supporting Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine, out of a sense of responsibility to take a position diametrically opposed to what they perceive as the mainstream and to not miss an opportunity to signal their virtues. In both of these examples, people who start out wanting to do what they can to help the less fortunate end up falling into rigid, black-and-white thinking, fueled by a sense of perpetual outrage at what they see as a fallen and corrupted world primarily defined by injustice. In my view, this trap is particularly ensnaring for young people, many of whose adolescent experiences have been defined by dysfunctional families, economic hardship, uncaring school administrations, and intolerant bigotry, all of which can cause or exacerbate significant mental health difficulties. In the absence of clear guidance from adults as to how to navigate the world and serve the public good, it is just as possible to turn to the far left as to the far right, as both offer a sense of solidarity and community in the face of isolation and despair.
This is of course facilitated to a very high extent via the internet and social media, as the degree of anonymity and remoteness provided make it that much easier to dole out iron-clad moral judgements to people whose intentions you never have to worry about trying to understand. This impulse to slap the label “problematic” onto somebody and view them as in need of repentance has almost created a perception of Gen. Z as strangely puritanical, especially around issues of identity, which is especially ironic given the role that religious institutions, such as both the Catholic and Protestant churches, have played in perpetuating systems of oppression. This is framed in the language of avoiding being (seen as) complicit in harm at all costs, just as devout Christians feel the scrutinizing eyes of God judging their everyday actions. It’s almost as though some Gen. Z’ers are simply replicating what they’ve seen done in the past, so concerned are they that “the personal is political” that they forget the beginning of that Audre Lorde quote, i.e. that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” (Some people use this quote to argue that things like voting are “master’s tools,” but I personally don’t go along with this interpretation.) It is here where the progressive left runs the risk of becoming oppressive in its own right, fuels paranoid conservative propaganda painting it as such, and alienates potential allies by asking them to sign up for potential ostracism. Furthermore, while progressives like to imagine themselves as being inclusive of all marginalized groups, there is not much recognition of the way in which the strict rules of this kind of environment can prove almost incomprehensible to people in the neurodivergent community. It is my sincere hope that young people recognize the dangers of this approach, and gradually embrace a willingness to be more understanding.
As for those young people who accepted that they were supposed to get what they got and never get upset, who became disengaged and dejected during their adolescence and who see politics as irrelevant to their lives, they also represent a real reaction to the kind of upbringing that they have had. I saw this first-hand when I attended a French immersion program in the summer of 2019, where a significant majority of students there had seemingly been forced to attend by their parents, leading to their non-investment in the language pledge, making it harder for myself and the few others who were genuinely interested in learning the language to do so and to socialize. I suspect that these are many of the same people who have spent their time in high school and even middle school engaging in tobacco and alcohol as a way to commiseratively escape the nihilism that living in our late-stage-capitalist society and navigating its education system can generate. I don’t mean to sound like the stereotypical adult with negative opinions of the subsequent generations, but I am concerned that Gen. Alpha will contain a greater proportion of people exhibiting this type of behavior, given that they are growing up in an environment of even more internet-facilitated social pressure and a significantly less healthy society as a whole. This is where it becomes essential for Gen. Z and millennials (or Gen. Y) to step into a role model position, especially as millennials become parents themselves. I have also seen a sentiment among millennials online where they feel that their opportunity to make a difference has already come and gone, and that they hope Gen. Z succeeds where they “failed,” to which I say, have you tried running for office? The average politician is far older than millennials currently are, a fact which will presumably change at some point in the future, but only through engagement with the political process. Millennials have already voted overwhelmingly Democratic in each election when they’ve been eligible to vote, and have been the generation most severely impacted by the student loan debt crisis. I’m not convinced that it’s time for millennials to throw in the towel just yet.
Young people can and must stand up and fight, and many have done so already. If we create a fair society and a just education system where there was previously unfairness and injustice, history will remember it as the great American revitalization. If we demand that future generations not have to go through what we have experienced, we will earn the gratitude of our descendants even if we are ultimately unsuccessful. And if we can follow the lead of other countries, where middle school is not seen as an inescapable hell on earth, whose teenagers are not consumed by anxiety and depression, we will have a world of healthier, more responsible adults to show for it. During this series, I have endeavored to explore the principles that lie at the heart of the effort to make the world a better place, and I have found that what it will require from us is a willingness to imagine a society run in the way that kids know it ought to be. Kids know that each person should have access to water and food when we have more than enough for everyone, that they should have a house to live in when there are empty houses lying around, that they should have access to transportation systems to get them from place to place, that they should be able to visit the doctor without going broke, and that they should have the right to learn and become a better version of themself. But at some point, kids are taught that these things are unrealistic and naïve, and that to be a mature adult, you have to accept that life’s not fair and that’s just how it is. They’re taught that you get what you get, and you don’t get upset. But look at the state of the world as it is, and you’ll find plenty to get upset about. It’s only once we get upset that we can see a path to a different way of life. That’s what being a progressive and a social democrat means to me. In the words of Dr. Seuss,
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Thank you for reading The Case for Social Democracy! I hope you found this exploration of our present-day society and its history to be insightful and meaningful. I may return to this series with an epilogue focusing on the mindset of the far-right, and what we have to understand about them in order to combat them more effectively. In the meantime, stay safe and make good trouble.
