The Future Is Back

Can the Young, Again, Lead the Way?

Left Greta Thurnburg; Middle: Katy Ledecky: Right:Amanda Gorman; A Great Generation

In the 1960s, the United States confronted, as it does now, serious challenges – real ones – the assassinations of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the urban riots and civil rights battles, a faraway war heading toward defeat, among other matters. Leading the way in advocacy, protest, and activism were people in their teens and twenties. Sixty years later these same crusaders are widely dismissed with the phrase, “OK Boomer”; mocked for their style and attitudes; and derided for the vexed world that young people today consider to be their legacy.

No generation is perfect. Those who fought successfully against fascism left us with inequality, racism, and misogyny that are still part of our social fabric. There is no doubt that the crises of 2022 – democracy imperiled, climate change, states’ rights used to undermine national priorities – all meet the accepted definitions of existential.

So how do we assess the current role of boys and girls; men, women, and gender fluid; teens and twentysomethings?

From the vantage of my advanced age, this generation can be frustrating. Ask those dealing with demands on campuses and in the workplace, asserting orthodoxies and grievances from the left and from the right.

On the other hand, from all appearances this generation takes very seriously issues that, while not new, are increasingly urgent.

Give us some evidence.

Greta Thunberg is a Nobel laureate and, it has been reported, she is on the autism spectrum. “High functioning” is the cliché, but it may well be that this “special need” (as the saying goes) offers her clarity and courage on climate issues. In the 1960s, autism was barely recognized and widely attributed to “frigid mothers.”

Katy Ledecky is by any reasonable standard one of if not the greatest of all time in competitive swimming. It is very hard to be a world-class athlete, as Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles have declared. Ledecky, from all accounts, is handling the stress and ambition of her place in sports with remarkable grace and grit. To remind, there were no Title IX requirements in the 1960s. Billie Jean King and others of her generation brought these about.

Amanda Gorman is a young Black woman tapped to deliver poetry at a presidential inauguration, standing in the place where Robert Frost held the podium in 1961. At 24, her insights are already considered classics.

These are all celebrities. Who else?

This is where I get up close and personal. My daughter, Katherine Sanford, is a middle school social studies teacher in the Lagunitas district of northern California. She teaches a cross section of kids, not from the inner city or especially privileged suburbs but representative of a great many teenagers across the country.

Katherine’s goal is to help her students understand the world they live in, the way our modern culture presents, distorts, and even terrifies. Each year she sets a goal for the students, a “Change Project” they devise and work to implement. At the end of the year, there is a TED-style assembly in which the students describe their projects and what they have achieved. Here is a list of this year’s presentations and if you have two hours for inspiration, here is the YouTube of the event. (Lagunitas TED Talks 6.2.22)

And after a two-year Covid hiatus, Katherine’s eighth graders and their families raised the money for a trip to Georgia and Alabama to see civil rights sites – the Lynching Museum, for example --- and meet kids from a local school much closer to that history than they are.

Bravo Lagunitas! What about the rest of the country?

From what I read, and the chances I get to talk to teenagers and twentysomethings, I am impressed with how aware they are of the world: from their phones, Instagram, TikTok and the full range of discourse that unfolds wherever they gather. Their sensitivities abound – concerned, often scared, and broadly committed to positive change, in their self-interest and ours.

Earnestness is a characteristic of youth. Can they avoid cynicism and frustration when so much is going wrong?

My grandson, Ben Sanford, finished his Covid-diminished high school years a semester early and spent the winter and early spring on a National Outdoor Leadership School program in the Rockies. He and his friend Samantha agreed that there was an element of “suffering Olympics” in the focus on so much pressure their cohort faces, magnified because everyone is so connected.

These kids are definitely not numb (or dumb). Let’s cheer them on.