IT’S PERSONAL. It’s random.
It can happen to anyone, and it can happen anywhere — on an airplane or a city street, in a second grade classroom or at a midnight movie screening, on a college campus or in the middle of a shopping center parking lot.
That is the beginning of
Fears of a new generation, a column in today's
Boston Globe (paywall still down) by Joan Vennochi.
The intent of the column is to explore how different the fears are of today's younger people compared to those of us who, say grew up in the 1950s and 1960s with the ever-present threat of nuclear war as a dominant fear.
If you are 18-23 today, you have certain dates/events that are burned into your memory the way November 22, 1963 is for those of us around those ages on that date. The searing memory of 9/11/2001 is now joined by the events of last Monday in Boston.
That is important.
But it is not why I choose to share this column by Vennochi.
Vennochi looks at the acts of courage at places like the Twin Towers and in Copley Square. We can admire the heroism of first responders. But she reminds us that the horrible events of the 1960s - the assassinations of two Kennedys and of Martin Luther King - had a somewhat different response, in part because the targets of violence were "big guys" - major political figures. She writes
It was a challenge to the political agendas of specifically targeted individuals, and it inspired a generation to take up the causes of their lost leaders. In the memories of the dead, the children of the ’60s committed themselves to public service. They marched for civil rights and equal rights and against war. A country divided on those issues eventually reached enough consensus to bring about dramatic changes of law and culture.
Here I will say "Yes, but . . ." because in recent decades we have seen a strand of revisionism that has challenged and even sought to roll back some of the "dramatic changes of law and culture" and I include in that some of the decisions from our nation's highest Court.
Vennochi argues that the response to 9-11 did not inspire any mass movements on the part of the people or any dedication to a great cause (although I would note there were a large number of people who chose military service in response to what had happened). Instead,
The fear it brought makes people less tolerant and smaller in their vision and thinking.
She notes the apparent willingness to give up
a degree of privacy and freedom in exchange for safety and security, some of it illusory.
She suspects that we will see more movement in that direction in the wake of the events at the Boston Marathon and afterward. Despite the positive moments,
the old, depressing politics of terror will ultimately break out again and continue to divide the country along ideological lines — unless today’s generation does something to stop it.
That is the challenge she presents. What will today's generation do?
It is for Vennochi more than just Boston. It is Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, where we also saw individual acts of heroism,
But so far, the pleas by parents of the children killed in that rampage by a young man with a semiautomatic rifle have not been enough to inspire a major overhaul of gun legislation.
Here I will stop for just a moment. I can already hear those who are inflexible on their view of gun rights starting to object to her connecting those events with Boston. We have already seen some reactions to Boston in the form of wanting to further restrict immigration, even as we saw some of the reactions to gun violence the attempt to make gun possession even broader, to wit, the Cornyn Amendment which would force a state with strict carry laws to honor the permits issued by states with loose laws (worth noting that there are already a fair number of bilateral agreements to recognize permitting by other states).
Vennochi's point is somewhat different. I read her as saying those of us who are older have not yet found the appropriate way to address these related issues, issue of fear, experience of violence of various sorts.
Which is why she concludes her piece like this:
Perhaps it’s time for the generation that inherited this world of fear and violence to do something about changing it.
I think she has actually hit on something. In matters of marriage equality and rights for LGBT people, our younger people are far more advanced than are many in positions of power. In part it is the difference of experience, of knowing people who are "out" in a way they were not the half century or so ago of the education of people at the leading age of the baby boom, like me. We know the younger the cohort the more tolerant on matters of sexuality people are.
Perhaps related, we also know that the percentage of households owning guns has been going down, even as the number of firearms in the country has expanded more quickly than has the population. That also seems to indicate a difference by generation.
We are often told that "9/11 changed everything." Perhaps, but perhaps how things changed now itself needs to be changed.
Which I why I find myself in agreement with those final words by Vennochi:
Perhaps it’s time for the generation that inherited this world of fear and violence to do something about changing it.
Peace.