Vanity Fair had an essay contest about why people weren't rioting in the streets about the Iraq war, comme Vietnam. Well I decided to submit an essay, 1,497 words out of the maximum of 1500 about the topic. I figured it would be an intresting thing to talk about and it is below the flip.
You could feel the distinctive smell of spring. The recently turned season left a distinct feel, an emotion that a simple change of days could not accomplish. The sense of urgency arose as the great weather was right around the corner. You could hear the bird chirping and you saw the sun shining and the snow slowly melting away. The dark cold days of winter had passed and the beach days of summer had yet to come. Wedged in between, the days of the boys of summer, the national pastime, baseball. People of all ages play as the American tradition requires. The carefree nature of playing for the love of the game, running around the bases with only home plate on your mind. Yet this was not the little league baseball game of yesteryear, it was the baseball of the new millennium.
The kids were seven and eight years old, signed up in a local league. This was not a game, but merely a practice. Ethan came to the plate to take batting practice, with his overbearing mother behind the backstop
Swing and a miss
Swing and a miss
After several more failed attempts at contact, you could see the grimace on his face. The look was not indicative of the sense of shame of embarrassment at failing to make contact with the tiny white ball. It was the sense of anger at what he knew was inevitable
"You aren't swing correctly" says the 45 year old short, pudgy and un-athletic mother.
"Mom, leave me alone. I'm just playing"
"No Ethan do it right. You have to play well"
At that point she took him aside to "show" him how to swing better. This wasn't a game. She was making him practice, for the practice. Isn't that what the practice was for in the first place? You felt bad for him, forced to take practice swing at a non-existent ball with the hovering mom barking orders at how to practice well. You got the sense that it wasn't the kid who was ashamed of not playing well - he was having a good time just taking batting practice with his friends. It was the ultra competitive mother who could just not handle the fact that her kid was not the best.
"If he isn't successful on the field, at all of 8 years old, how could he possibly be successful in life" was the deluded thought going through her head
However, it didn't end there.
Because her `coaching was obviously top quality in her mind, it must be the coaches fault that Ethan isn't dominating the practice.
"Throw it better" she yelled towards the coach, a mild mannered 38 year old lawyer, whose son is also on the team.
"I'm doing the best I can maim" replied the coach
"Well do better"
The coach was obviously irked that she challenged her soft tossing during a practice. Everyone was irked at the overzealous, domineering mom. But she had accomplished her objective. No longer was her son embarrassed - instead she had embarrassed herself.
What does this have to do with the war in Iraq and why people aren't protesting? The parental anxiety towards their children's future, pushing them to constantly get good grades is currently unrivaled by any other generation of parents. Children yelling at teachers and children, making sure that their little Johnny can be `successful'. The mom felt that if she did not prod her son into a lifetime of being successful at what he does, there is no way that he could ever end up a doctor , a lawyer or go to a good college and achieve the goal in the long run - make lots of money.
Where does this pressure come from? Looking deep into the issue, you must venture towards free trade. Of their parents' generation, they worked 50 years at the same company and then retired. Work was like a second family. There was no such thing at outsourcing. IN the current day, rarely does anyone work long term at one job. Constantly, reorganization is consolidating jobs and outsourcing is sending your job to Bangalore. Parents are not oblivious to this - they see their kids and they don't want them to have to go through the same job search, the same unemployment that they have gone through. They only way to do this is to get them so far ahead in society, their position so important, their prestige and wealth so high, that there is no way their job could be condensed or sent to India. This constant fretting, this pressure to absolve their children of these difficult rites of adulthood, gets transferred to kids.
No longer can they have a good time, be involved in politics or current affairs. Instead, they must be at the helm, preparing to `succeed' in school by working laboriously to learn material, or at least memorize the material in order to fake it. Now instead of being able to take time off to go into the city to attend an anti-war protest, Johnny needs the time to do extra intensive SAT preparation that no kid had even 20 years ago. His focus is not on helping society, but on faking society into thinking that they know what they are doing, so that they can achieve this career nirvana.
However, one can not only focus on that issue as insulating of today's society. Another thing that keep kids from having the affects of war reach them directly is the draft. Right now, living in a rich and mostly white suburb, people don't talk about poverty. Many have never met a family in poverty in their lives, and there are very few black or Hispanic children in the school system. The people in our way of life aren't directly affected by that was because there is no draft. The people fighting are miles away, in our inner cities, who don't look like the people who go to our school. They might as well be eons away. The Vietnam draft mobilized people to act because as a young person you had to weight your own life against the possible benefits of the war. In Vietnam, people were dying so the bulk of society truly had to asses whether the war was worth it, which by protests many felt that risking their lives half way around the world was not worth it. Right now, someone has to weigh the benefits of the war against zero sacrifice. They will not be in Iraq; instead they can continue to go to college, like Lawyer Daddy and Doctor Mommy want them too. Rather than sacrificing, the rich continue to get more money through the tax cuts, so no one except the poor is feeling the pinch of the war. Suburban children can still go to their chic malls and buy name brand clothing and fill up their SUV's with 75 dollars of gasoline. As a result chickenhawks, those who advocate war yet did not fight in the war of their generation, and arm chair serviceman can talk tough about the war, support it to the full extent, speak about how it's a great war, and sign up - sign up at their local College Republican Society. This is instead of dying, like the poor, in the streets of Kabul and Najaf. They can continue sitting around complacently, talking about celebrities' breakups and going to parties.
However, maybe this entire analysis is not right. Maybe it's not the insulating nature of these two factors. It may just be that the issues don't pierce as deep into the social conscience of today's teens because they simply are not as strong issue wise. In Vietnam, much of the protesters were talking about the Vietnam War, but a much larger majority were campaigning for equal rights for blacks, women and other oppressed minority groups. Their message was co-opted by the anti-war crowd, and they in a sense joined forces. Things like segregation, racism and the like were clear moral enigma's violating basic moral absolutes. This brought people out into the streets, with issues that struck your conscience as morally wrong and incompatible with society's expectations for equal treatment for all. However, much of the issues today are much more muddled than the civil rights or women's rights movements of that era. An issue like abortion, or gay marriage, are just much more complex that the issues of that day. There is no clear cut moral answer to those questions, so it tempers both sides of the debate, and keeps the issue much more divided in a moral sense. No one can say for certain that abortion is right, or wrong, or whether the right to privacy really exists in the constitution. However, people could with the most sincere of heart tell you that segregation, the southern strategy of the Republicans, and other ills of that era were wrong with no questions asked and no complications to the issue.