A great number of things have been going incredibly wrong lately. It seems as if you can pretty much take your pick of political, social and economic topics and find glaring faults within any one of them; problems numerous enough to give fits of consternation and depression to even the most optimistic among us. The Washington echo chamber is up to the same old game using the same old players. The entrenched Democratic old guard is trying to flex their collective muscles and strong-arm an unwilling president who would prefer to play a different game. The decimated Republican old guard is hawking tired party lines and ideologies; looking left, right, north and south for fresh relief. Nothing is happening, nothing is changing. Meanwhile, the blue and red hamsters continue to run contently inside their wheels.
Congress has been embattled in Baby Boom generational warfare for such a long time that they find it impossible to acknowledge the very problems they are elected to come together to fix. All they can do is issue banal talking memos attacking each other. Meanwhile, a growing impatience is building as the nation awaits the undefined change that those in control of Congress have not even begun to talk about.
Interestingly enough in spite of a job market that is shrinking and contracting at record rates, in spite of doom and gloom prognostications concerning our nations infrastructure, health-care structure, banking system, national security, education system, food and drug safety and judicial system, young adults of all backgrounds are bucking trends and putting their hearts and minds to real problems that demand great amounts of hard work and dedicated effort. If there is needed proof that this country is experiencing a divergence of ideals and a generational divide, look no further than the large numbers of young adults looking for causes to tackle with the ambition and can-do-it attitude that only youth can provide.
Programs such as Teach for America, AmeriCorps, Peace Corps and volunteer organizations of all stripes, from religious to non-religious, from hurricane clean-up to inner-city soup kitchens, are experiencing record numbers for involvement. Even those not strictly altruistically motivated are looking for jobs or starting their own companies in fields that are trying to address some of our country's most pressing problems with inventions including new and creative angles from new battery technologies to multimedia in our elementary schools.
The X/Y generation we belong to has been the butt of countless jokes for our indifference to politics, our fashion and music tastes, our obsession with pop culture and our habitual need to ""be connected."" However, we are also the ""let me try"" generation. Technological innovation and its imperfect infusion into our own and our society's daily lives has instilled a key personality trait in a great many X/Yers: We are not afraid to try, fail and try again in order to make something work. Many of us programmed our parents' VCRs and TiVo boxes, we set-up the computer and wireless router, taught our parents and grandparents how to use their cell phone, how to text and what a social networking site is and helped a teacher operate the DVD player properly in class.
We have experimented and tried to work through adult-created problems with adults and authority figures watching over our shoulders our whole lives. And now in the face of the great struggles our nation is witnessing, almost all of the power positions in our government and in our most important corporations are being held hostage by the very generation that spent in excess, bickered in abundance and myopically viewed their obligations to future generations, resulting in the current fiasco we call a democratic government.
So I have one suggestion for the Baby Boom members of Congress and those CEOs, Wall Street executives and bank presidents who are still hanging on to the vain hope that they will become part of the solution: Please, go gently into that good night. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the rest, please go away. Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., please, please go gently into that good night. You have lost our ear and lost our confidence. Give another generation a chance. Let me try.
Joseph Koss is a junior majoring in secondary education in social studies. We welcome your feedback. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
