Voice of Generation Occupy? "Out of My Way"

This piece, published yesterday in the Washington Post by a graduate student, Thomas Day, has attracted a lot of worthy attention. Although it was written on the occasion of the child abuse scandal and the culture of complicity connected to yet another institutional elite that has become unaccountable in its conduct -- this time not financial fraudsters or Catholic priests or regulation agencies captured by the industries they should oversee, but leaders of a world famous college athletic program, the truth is that the tone of despair and disgust with failed would-be elites sounds a note familiar to anyone who listens to the young people participating in the Occupy Movements sweeping the institutional landscape at this moment as well.

Although the writer is fully fifteen years younger than me I feel a visceral identification myself with much that he says here. Even so, I think that there are places where even he is not delving quite so deeply as one has to do to get at what is wrong and what it righteous in this historical moment of failure and resistance and promise. And so, I have not just pruned his piece a bit, but interrupted it a few times to pressure some of his premises a bit (follow the link for his piece whole and uninterrupted). Still, I wouldn't want these interruptions to be mistaken as indicating a greater disagreement than I feel. Again, much even most of what Day says rings painfully and forcefully true to me.

I’m 31, an Iraq war veteran, a Penn State graduate, a Catholic, a native of State College, acquaintance of Jerry Sandusky’s, and a product of his Second Mile foundation. And I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents’ generation. I was one of the lucky ones. My experience with Second Mile was a good one. I should feel fortunate, blessed even, that I was never harmed. Yet instead this week has left me deeply shaken, wondering what will come of the foundation, the university, and the community that made me into a man. One thing I know for certain: A leader must emerge from Happy Valley to tie our community together again, and it won’t come from our parents’ generation. They have failed us, over and over and over again. I speak… of the public leaders our parents’ generation has produced. With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.” They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.

I will admit that I am perplexed not only by the genuflection to politeness here but by the way it really does seem representative of so many in the generation of my best students. My own generation had little patience for politeness, and before you point to the failures of my generation to do anything progressive in an epoch of catastrophic privatization and corporatization and wealth concentration and militarization and environmental disaster, and propose that these failures suggest maybe it is time to change the tune, let me point out that I was active in precisely those struggles that were the least polite and most effective, around struggles against homophobic stigmatization of people with AIDS (marginalized), sodomy laws (gone), don't ask don't tell (repealed), legal discrimination against queer relationships and families (vanishing before our eyes), on the one hand, and in humanities department skirmishes for multiculturalism on the other hand. I know this viewpoint is not widely shared, but I happen to believe that my jaded and nonpolite generation of Queer Nationals and Riot Grrrls and politically correct English majors won the culture wars, a victory that has not yet fully been grasped or assessed but which built the cultural groundwork on which some of our best hopes for contemporary successes in the name of equity-in-diversity rest. Nevertheless, there truly is an earnestness and politeness in so much of Occupy, from the stunning People's Mic to bicycle power generation to nonviolence training and on-site teach-ins (one of the reasons why the violent police crackdowns are so surreal to witness). There's something very "Glee Generation" and not "Me Generation" in all this, though I do note that Day declares "out of my way" rather than "out of our way." Perhaps the latter would seem too threatening, too rude?

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work. For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

Let us not forget the extent to which this "boundless prosperity" was premised on the inflation of an actually unsustainable petrochemical bubble of car culture and toxic plastic and input-intensive topsoil depleting BigAg monoculture and suburban sprawl and white-racist flight, as well as the seduction, often at gunpoint, of post-colonial nations into phony development schemes yielding neo-imperial debt-enslavement, so we are indeed reaping the harvest of the deceptions and self-deceptions of the post-WWII generation, not just the betrayal of the comparatively greater accomplishments of that epoch, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the GI Bill, and the Marshall Plan.

We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us -- at the orders of our leader -- to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping. The times following September 11th called for leadership, not reckless, gluttonous tax cuts…

Of course, enlisting in the military was just one form that leadership might have taken, among others: for example, making the effort to better grasp the historical and structural forces that could lead fellow humans to undertake or support such destructive and desperate crimes. At the time, remember, those of us who suggested that 9-11 cried out for a better understanding and might even provide an occasion for connection among suffering nonviolent majorities across the planet were shouted down as traitors and appeasers. Exhortations to cut taxes for the rich and shop till we drop, disgusting though they were, were far from the worst things happening in the midst of that distress.

Those of us who did enlist were ordered into Iraq on the promise of being “greeted as liberators,” in the words of our then-vice president. Several thousand of us are dead from that false promise.

Not to mention the millions more we killed and crippled and curtailed ourselves.

We looked for leadership from our churches, and were told to fight not poverty or injustice, but gay marriage. In the Catholic Church, we were told to blame the media, not the abusive priests, not the bishops, not the Vatican, for making us feel that our church has failed us in its sex abuse scandal and cover-up. Our parents’ generation has balked at the tough decisions required to preserve our country’s sacred entitlements, leaving us to clean up the mess.

Worse still, they now sanctimoniously declare that their eagerness to dismantle these entitlements, from Medicare to Social Security to Public Education, is somehow "for America's children and grandchildren," even as they rush to reassure one another that all the benefits they refuse to pay for generations to come will still always be there for themselves. Truly revolting!

They let the infrastructure built with their fathers’ hands crumble like a stale cookie. They downgraded our nation’s credit rating. They seem content to hand us a debt exceeding the size of our entire economy, rather than brave a fight against the fortunate and entrenched interests on K Street and Wall Street. Now we are asking for jobs and are being told we aren’t good enough, to the tune of 3.3 million unemployed workers between the ages of 25 and 34. This failure of a generation is as true in the halls of Congress as it is at Penn State.