Anecdotal evidence suggests that young people are not protesting America’s growing fascism because they don’t know anything else
I stopped by a protest yesterday in my little town and was surprised to discover that the youngest people there were the cops helping the elderly protestors cross the street and maintaining a hard line on anyone stepping off the curb or crossing outside of a crosswalk. I was told this was a safety issue, as if they gave a shit about anyone’s safety. They were doing their best to maintain order, the way you might in an unruly nursing home. I estimate that 98% of the protestors I saw were over the age of 60, and I would further speculate that at least 75% of them were over the age of 70.
This wasn’t an impromptu drop-in for me. I made plans to go, but there was otherwise little planning involved on my part. I didn’t make a sign or pick out a special outfit or costume. I made the executive decision to leave my phone and wallet in the car (entirely unnecessary) and bring a real camera. You could argue that I copped out by acting as a journalist rather than a participant, since I no longer have a news magazine at my disposal and made no plans to offer the images to a traditional media outlet. I was just wandering around taking pictures and looking official. I even wore my press badge.
I still struggle with the practicality of it all. I tried to sound convincing when explaining to my wife the 3.5% rule, that at some point, there comes a tipping point in society where the public has had enough and the authoritarian regime falls. I want to believe this, but I remain skeptical. If eight million Americans showed up yesterday in thousands of protests, that would account for just 2.3% of the population. Not exactly a groundswell of dissent likely to strike fear into the hearts of Donald Trump and his incompetent goons.
I found one fellow I know sitting on a bench and holding a sign that read “Veterans Against Trump” or something like that. Iraq? Afghanistan? Venezuela? No, Vietnam. A war that ended over 50 years ago. I’m not making light of his protest, but it did make me wonder, where were the veterans from this century?
I don’t have any research to support my position, but I suspect that so many young people have grown up in such a dysfunctional society with such a broken government that they fail to grasp the enormity of our current situation simply because they have no memory of it ever being different. Taken from that perspective, it’s understandable that they would be less shocked and offended by the actions of the current administration.
This is why when you show up to a protest, it’s a lot of aging former hippies and deviants of a certain age. There are no young people, no one of color. Just a bunch of old, white, doddering souls in orthopedic shoes. Blacks, Hispanics, and anyone under the age of 40 have apparently either decided that this is not their fight or that it is an ineffective way to bring about change. Maybe they were all at their second or third job so they could afford rent. Maybe they simply had better things to do.
All of this is to say that it gives me pause about the ability to vote our way out of our current situation. I warned that this would be the result back in 2015 and again in 2023, but I was told I was being ridiculous. The balance of the Supreme Court was at stake. We were hurtling towards the point of no return, and everyone just seemed to be enjoying the wind in their hair. People stayed home or voted for worthless third-party candidates, thereby abdicating any responsibility for maintaining a democracy because “both parties are corrupt” and “all politicians are the same.”
Those of us over 50 have lived our entire lives in a period of relative peace and prosperity, the greatest period of growth and progress in our nation’s history. The younger generations have only known chaos and dysfunction in government, so they have little to no expectation of a government that serves the people. If you’re under the age of 35, you’ve never really known a government that wasn’t wholly owned by corporate interests and wealthy individuals. Citizens United marked a significant departure from representative democracy and was the beginning of the end.
Young people have no memory of a time when we all got our news from a handful of reliable sources where news reporting aligned with agreed-upon facts that had some basis in truth. World affairs and public policy were not a choose-your-own-adventure game where you got to define your own reality. That’s all changed now.
Walking around at the protest, looking at the age of the people protesting, reading their signs, and watching their reactions, this was clearly a privileged group expressing their displeasure at what they saw as a transgression against good taste, rather than the white-hot rage you might expect from a truly disgruntled populace. Even the name of the protest offered too much weight to the power of the criminal currently occupying the White House. It was a tea party, but no one was destroying anything. They were just drinking tea in the sun.
These were longtime homeowners with 401K plans, pensions, Social Security, and Medicare. Most of them were no doubt retirees with serious concerns about the future, but they were not revolutionaries looking for radical change. They simply wanted to return to the halcyon days of semi-functional government; a time when you could parade around bitching about Reagan and his horoscope-loving wife, and feel like you’d delivered a blow against “compassionate cruelty.”
I’m generally not much of a worrier. I don’t see the point in agonizing over things I have no control over, but the nation’s collective anxiety has been on high alert for over a decade, and it’s prematurely aged us all for sure. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but the old tricks aren’t working, and the young people have failed to invent new ones.
We were all hoping that the younger generations would take up the fight and come up with a new plan of attack. Something innovative and surprising that involved some new technology that could disrupt the status quo. Instead, we got emotionally stunted and psychologically broken children swiping through dating apps in their parents’ basements and watching influencers promote lifestyles they’ll never achieve.
Where do we go from here?
