Like Roger Daltrey, I would like to talk about my generation, but I’m going to do so in far less communitarian terms and without any melody. I am quite often ashamed of my generation, and with good reason. We are the generation of the seven-minute attention span. We are the generation of instant-gratification, broadband internet, and instant messaging. We are the ego-massagers, the trend-worshippers, and the parental basement dwellers. We are the byproduct of reality TV, MySpace and Napster. We know how to type 100 words per minute, but we misspell about half of them. We are a generation dreadfully ignorant of the past and terribly optimistic about the future. We are overeducated, under-utilized, and we have no identity.
The vitriolic diatribe against my peers that you just read is the byproduct of the candidacy of Barack Obama and my generation’s reaction to it. Now, let me just say before I go any further, that I in no way, shape, or form endorse anything about John McCain’s presidential campaign aside from the unintentional comedy quotient generated by it, which is approaching Dukakis-like levels of hilarity. I am not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat, Libertarian, Green Party Member, or Dixiecrat. However, just because I think McCain is a hobbling, bumbling, geriatric time bomb does not mean I cannot still be slightly nauseated by the Hale-Bop-like fervor generated in college-age kids by Obama.
I don’t hate Obama for what he is or for what he stands for. His policies regarding every aspect of domestic and foreign affairs are much more palatable than those of The Shrub (a moniker W. picked up and somehow shrugged off during the 2000 primaries) or McCain. He’s heading in the right direction on everything from healthcare to the war in Iraq to education, but he’s only heading there. What my generation seems to have forgotten is that this man is a politician, a class of people only a notch above lawyers, hedge fund managers, and date rapists. And yet, my peers eat up every word he says like it was manna from heaven, not taking the time to question whether his rhetoric is simply rhetoric or if it is even feasible.
Obama’s trademark slogans, “Change you can believe in,” “The Audacity of Hope,” and “Yes we can,” are at the heart of my distaste for his followers. They are bite sized and just what the doctor ordered for a generation of kids raised on eight minutes then a commercial break and ideologies that fit on a bumper sticker. We, and I include myself deliberately in this statement, want so badly to believe that there is some sort of objective goodness in the world that we tend to conveniently misremember facts or not search for them in the first place.
I was an Obama-ite early in the primary season. The man is young, vibrant, black, and a brilliant orator. The idea of not only getting Bush out of the White House, but replacing him with a historic African-American candidate who could keep jam-packed arenas on the edge of their seats with his speeches seemed almost magical. I remember listening to his speech after the South Carolina primary in my car and thinking to myself, “he sounds like Martin Luther King.”
I wish that I could say Glow-Bama was satire...
However, as the weeks passed on, his speeches remained the same, delivered like an actor playing in a Sunday matinee of a play’s 4th month on Broadway. It was all style with a substance chaser. He never spelled out any of his actual plans for aiding the failing economy, instituting universal health care, or getting out of Iraq. He simply uttered platitude after platitude as his audiences ate it up. As the primaries ended and he moved on the presidential campaign, I saw him make the inevitable move to the center. He approved letting the phone companies off the hook for wiretapping, said he would have troops out of Iraq in 16 months rather than right away, and supported the repeal of gun control laws in D.C.
All of this happened and my generation is still as giddy for Obama as they ever were, fawning over him like a bunch of teenage girls at Shea Stadium in ’65 with Fab Four fever. This is why I am depressed, discouraged, and ashamed for my fellow Generation Y-ers. They have no depth. They don’t want any depth. We were born post-Watergate and grew up led by one president who was a egotist and a pathological liar about his private life and another president who was foolhardy, ignorant, and wholly incompetent. My generation latched onto Obama like a parasite because we needed something to believe in and we didn’t care much what the validity of that something was.
My ranting and raving aside, I am still going to vote for Obama come November. If you give a man a choice between starving or eating table scraps, you’d be a damn fool not to take the gristle that falls off the table. What I worry about are those in my generation who believe that Obama truly is some sort of secular savior. That the country will radically change for the better if he reaches office. The history of presidential elections is one of false promises and accommodation. Woodrow Wilson promised the nation that we wouldn’t enter World War I. FDR promised us in 1940 that we wouldn’t enter World War II. Richard Nixon promised in 1968 that “new leadership will end the war” in Vietnam. George H.W. Bush told us to read his lips: ”no new taxes.” To believe that Obama is any different than these men is an exercise in naivete and masochism.
We are forty years removed from the Summer of Love and a political climate unlike anything in our nation’s history. There was a counterculture back then as opposed to the fragmented, commercialized excuse for a counterculture we have today. If there is anyone from my generation who is laboring under the misapprehension that there will be change with Obama in 2008 like there was in ’68, I implore you to consider this. The Democratic candidate for president in ’68 was Hubert H. Humphrey. The counterculture showed its overwhelming support for Humphrey by rioting at the Democratic National Convention. Their change they could believe in was anti-establishment, grassroots change that was practiced not orated. Change never comes from within a government. Its always comes from without and it doesn’t come easily. When Obama delivers his State of the Union Address three years from now promising the same things he is today, my generation will realize they blew their wad on the wrong guy.
