476. Youth (and Age) in a Changing America

This is the twenty-fifth entry in a month-long series, Fifty years in the United States: An immigrant’s perspective, as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

As I approach the finish line of this whirlwind review of the last 50 years in America, my face is way up close to the screen as I look around at things that are unfolding now and try to see ahead to the United States post-pandemic. As I do so find myself thinking about youth more and more; not my youth, not youth as a stage of life, but the youth of this country and what they are going to inherit. I’m also thinking about the relationship between youth and age, not as a generation gap, but as a collaboration.

In this past month’s daily posts I seem to have been relying on more and more hastily hyperlinked data, but today I want to keep it simple and you can call me on my claims if they’re not supported by facts. But in every opinion poll I’ve looked at, the youth across the country are more tolerant, more open-minded, more ready to embrace difference than any other age group. The youth are more politically liberal than any other group; restrictions on voting are one of the main obstacles to their playing a major role in the outcome of Presidential elections. The youth are the most concerned about the threat of unchecked climate change and the most willing to do something to do something about it. Finally, thanks to this generation of youth, America is only going to get more demographically diverse as time goes on.

‘Post-Millennials’ on Track to Be Most Diverse, Best-Educated Generation Yet (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

As for my generation, the Baby Boomers rapidly going into what may or may not be a prolonged old age (depending on whether COVID-19 or some other catastrophe wipes a large number of us out), our proportion of the population is projected to rise steadily over the next forty years. We vote in higher numbers, but we are also whiter, more conservative, less willing to accept climate change as a reality, more fearful of immigrants, and more resistant to the reality of an increasingly diverse America. Although a new wave of young people and women are being elected to Congress and are already making waves, wealthy old white men still dominate both Congress and the Senate; until they wake up or get out of the way, they are going to be an obstacle to the structural change needed to green the planet, reduce the wealth gap, and increase the security and quality of life for the rest of us.

Rally for Bernie Sanders in L.A.

I loved the relationship that Senator Bernie Sanders had with young people during his Presidential campaigns. The mutual love and respect was tangible. He refused to be a guru figure, lecturing or preaching to his disciples from a lofty height; young people ran his campaign and he looked to them to shape his policy and correct his course when needed. They joined him in much higher numbers than they did to young candidates like Pete Buttigieg.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a rally in Wichita, Kansas, July 20, 2018. (J Pat Carter / Getty Images)

You don’t automatically get respect by virtue of age; you have to earn it. And the way to earn it is to learn how to listen, speaking to everyone as equals equally worth of respect, regardless of age; keep reaching out to people and sharing your skills and life experience with them; and as long as you have breath in your body, keep being willing to step up when there is work to be done, inspiring younger people to step up with you. Bernie certainly did, and still is doing so as a Senator, fighting for the working people of America  who are the most vulnerable to the ravages of the coronavirus in a society that values the Almighty Dollar more than human life. Not Me, Us was his campaign’s slogan, and he lived it; young and old alike recognized that and felt embraced, not shunted aside as they are so often.

To me that is the ideal relationship between youth and age, something to aspire to. Pete Seeger had that relationship with young people as well, insisting on going to elementary schools and singing with the schoolchildren into his nineties. Here they are together, making and singing  Bob Dylan’s Forever Young in a project by and for Amnesty International.

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437. Wide Awake

My friend Anna brought her grandson Dylan to visit yesterday evening on the way back from the movies, the new remake of The Lion King. He was with us for an hour, hour and a half at the most, but boy, was he switched on, and so were we, the whole time.

From the moment he came in the front door he noticed everything, all the time, responded to it, remarked on it: the inordinate number of slippers in the straw basket in the entrance hall, the length of the galley kitchen, the image on one of the coasters (a gloomy old gargoyle from the Bodleian Library)—there was nothing that escaped his keen eye. I was slower on the uptake. He had a sharp new haircut, which I eventually commented on admiringly once I noticed it; he took the praise lightly but with appreciation.

I got out the carrom board, which had been relegated to a corner of the living room since the last children had visited, back at Christmas. As soon as I compared it to pool he understood all the rules—you got a second turn if you pocketed a piece, you had to cover the queen in order to win (this was just like pocketing the eight ball in pool, he pointed out), you forfeited a point if you accidentally sunk the striker. Here he had more questions that I was unable to answer, such as what happens if you sink a piece along with the striker. He was soon improving his technique and controlling the force he put into his shots. He didn’t throw a tantrum when he found himself repeatedly sinking his striker, but was a good sport; and when he won his first full game he announced it with quiet pride.

Although Anna had forewarned me that Dylan wasn’t a big eater, he knew what he liked. He had told his grandma after the movie that he wanted a hot dog, and sure enough, he ate two, on whole-wheat buns with ketchup. Although he did note that it was the reddest hot dog he had ever seen, I was relieved that this difference from what he was used to didn’t put him off. While he was at it he ate with gusto, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to get on to the next thing; after all, eating was a bit of a waste of time. About halfway through the meal he got up and stood behind his chair, testing something—himself, us, I’m not sure which. Perhaps anticipating an adult admonition like, “Finish eating before you leave the table”, he commented on it when we didn’t: “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” I think I tried to acknowledge what he had said without drawing undue attention to him: “Perhaps you’re just experimenting”, or something like that.

During the meal he made conversation and, unlike many children, responded to questions from adults quite readily. What was The Lion King about? He had to think that one through a little, but his reply was spot-on. He identified the main character, the cub, explained that hyenas had teamed up with the cub’s uncle but—I was impressed here—didn’t simplify the plot to bad guys vs. good guys, and understood the concept of sacrifice, that the old King had saved the cub’s life at the cost of his own. He showed us how. Using his table napkin folded into a sharp point and the steep side of the napkin-holder, he demonstrated how the uncle had knocked the King down into the pit as he was trying to climb up. (By the way, I haven’t seen the film, so have only Dylan’s account to go on.)

Asked how his basketball camp was going, he was quite forthcoming, although I don’t think he would have volunteered any information without the prompting. He told us how many children there were, how many coaches, how many teams, how many games they played per day. He was both the youngest and the smallest, he told us, but it was his grandma who added that he was more than holding his own. He also told us that he had played basketball for a time at school, but hadn’t gotten one basket the whole season. Again Grandma was quick to point out that he was still very short for basketball, and that he got plenty of baskets while practicing.

Then it was time for dessert but he wasn’t much interested. He nibbled on an ice pop but soon got up to finish getting all the carrom pieces in and do push-ups on the carpet. Asked whether he intended to finish the ice pop he said that he was letting it melt and was going to scoop it up with a stick, but neither Anna nor I thought that that would work very well, and he didn’t push his luck. He came back to the table readily enough and ate a bit more of it, then was happy to let me finish it off. By now there was a new game starting, and we all needed to play a part in it: he sprinted from one end of the dining room to the far wall of the living room and back, while we spotted and timed him. First he ran the course, then sprinted, demonstrating the difference between the two. Then we estimated the total distance, and finally Grandma started the timer on her phone while Andrew counted off the seconds. Dylan completed the course in excellent time and then beat his own record twice. Once in-between, when the adults got distracted in conversation (how often and easily that happens!), he clapped his hands together to get us back on track, and even then it took a while for us to catch on.

He asked to use the toilet and insisted on crawling down the hall on his stomach, though I was able to dissuade him from doing the same through the kitchen. He noted the presence of the bidet in the bathroom, something new to him, and asked what it was for. Before I left the room he asked me to confirm that the left faucet was indeed the hot water and the right the cold, telling me that he had once encountered a sink where they were reversed.

Dylan had a terrific sense of humor throughout, sharp without being unkind, yet wasn’t afraid to express his fears, even to someone he didn’t know very well. During the racing, at the far end of the living room where he touched the wall and turned around for the return trip, there was a tall narrow window with the Venetian blinds up to reveal the overgrown flagstone path along the side of the house. All the adults were near the starting line in the dining room, and in tagging the far wall he had to catch a glimpse of that shadowy passage in the gathering dusk. After a couple of runs he asked me to stand there by the window because he was afraid someone or something might jump out at him. My heart melted. Just in case I forgot (how could I possibly have forgotten?), he reminded me, but I was already standing guard, with the blinds lowered and a hand out to speed up his turnaround. Once again he bested his previous record.

When Grandma said it was nearly his bedtime, he didn’t make a fuss. Just one last game of carrom was all he asked. As he said goodnight after having come up from behind to a surprise victory, Dylan mock-ceremoniously shook hands and cheekily called Andrew “Madam” and me “Sir”; I returned the joke by addressing him as Your Majesty.

We were tired after he had left, but oh, so switched on. I marveled at the energy required of parents (good job, Ellen and Jason!) and the energy we must have had when we were young parents ourselves. But much more than that I marveled at the electric aliveness of children, noticing every little thing, immersed wholly into every activity, their imaginations constantly on the go. I fell asleep last night thinking of the visit, everything Dylan had said and done, and most of all, his alert state of being. After not having been inspired to write a new story for nearly two months, I woke at dawn today and decided not to go back to sleep. Instead I came into the living room and just started writing (dear Andrew following soon after and bringing me a mug of tea). With less than a month of my summer left, I resolve to be like a child and live every day of it, wide awake.

P.S. A few years ago the Bodleian Library held a competition for new gargoyles designed by children, unveiled in 2009 by author Philip Pullman. Full of life and mischief, how different they are from the miserable old men on my coasters!

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431. Y is for Youth

My theme for this year’s Blogging from A-to-Z Challenge is Migrants, Refugees, and Exiles and today the letter Y stands for youth.

Youth is an estate from which I would be far removed were it not for my work, which gives me daily contact with undergraduates. As an oldster but a woman, at times I exert less authority than I might like, but most of the time I am grateful for the easy, if somewhat quizzical, familiarity between us.

 first-time voters in Arunachal Pradesh, India’s Easternmost state

But enough of the chit-chat. As I age, along with the world’s population, what role are the youth playing in the current zeitgeist? Where do they stand with respect to immigrants, refugees, and exiles?

It depends, of course, where they stand. Refugees and asylum-seekers are getting younger, with children making up 52% of the world’s refugee population in 2017, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). White supremacist groups and ISIS alike woo alienated youth, hoping to recruit impulsive young people seeking a sense of belonging. As instability and economic crisis increases, youth unemployment and despair rises, and the average age of suicide bombers and child soldiers falls, as groups like Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram forcibly recruit younger and younger children. In the United States, aging Baby Boomers, now in their sixties, decry the apathy of the youth, who are much less likely to engage in electoral politics than their elders. But leaders can rise and fall based on the youth turnout. In India’s 2019 general election, now underway, out of 900 million eligible voters, 84.3 million youth are eligible to cast their ballots for the first time, including 15 million who are 18-19 years old.

While it is easy, as one slides into senescence, to bemoan “the youth of today,” in fact many of these youth are showing us the way forward. In the United States, in contrast with the sensational media images of young men joining white nationalist groups in droves, there is the quieter evidence in opinion polls that on the whole, young people are much more liberal and open-minded than their parents and grandparents. In a heartening January 2019 report from the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans polled said that immigrants strengthened the country, but while only 44% of the “Silent Generation” (born 1928-1945) agreed, a whopping 75% of Millennials (born 1981-1996) weighed in with a Yes. In a Spring 2016 Global Attitudes Survey also conducted by Pew Research, the young were much less likely than the old to say that birthplace was very important to national identity. In the U.S., only 21% of 18-24 year-olds felt that it was important to have been born in the country to truly belong, as against 40% of those 50 and older. The poll revealed an even greater generational difference when the respondents were asked about the importance of observing national customs and traditions to national belonging. Among the Americans, only 28% of the 18-24 age group thought that “sharing such cultural elements was important to being truly American”, in contrast with 55% of those age 50 and older.

Increasingly, as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the Border Patrol (CBP) are ramping up detentions and deportations of children and more aggressively separating children and their parents, as the current administration is attempting to do away with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) making it harder and harder for undocumented immigrant youth to get access to an education or a decent job, the youth are mobilizing to fight back. As evidence and inspiration, I give you SIM, Student Immigrant Movement, the dynamic Massachusetts-based immigrant youth-led organization. Go to their website: it is a happening place.

SIM’s mission: We fight for the liberation of the undocumented community through the development of a network of immigrant youth organizers in high-density immigrant communities. We organize youth, ages 13-30, and provide political education, leadership training, protection, guidance, mentorship, and safe healing spaces.

SIM’s vision: Our vision is that all immigrant students have equal access to higher education, are not discriminated against based on their immigration status, collectively realize their full potential, define their own identity and become fully engaged in every aspect of society that affects their lives.

Join SIM today as a youth (ages 13-26), an ally/supporter, an immigrant or refugee (temporary or permanent, documented or undocumented). You can also become a monthly DREAM sustainer to help immigrant youth protect their communities. Just looking at a group of SIM youth gets my mojo and my metabolism working. When youth are at the leading edge of positive change, the only thing to do is to work with them.

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