With Bill Clinton's second inaugural address upon us, the long and mean 1996 campaign season has finally ended. Now college kids like me will lose our status, for at least three years, as prime targets of vote-hungry politicians.
The candidates discussed the importance of education, particularly how to finance it. Clinton promised to build a bridge to the next century for my generation, while Dole vowed that only his tax cut could salvage my future. Given the incessant pandering for the college-kid vote, you'd think that we had played something of an activist role in the presidential election. But according to the standard analysis of the Democratic Convention in Chicago this summer, we are passive and apathetic, pale versions of our 1960s-era activist parents.
Reporters covering the most planned, contrived and otherwise unnewsworthy convention in American history had to find something--anything--"interesting" to write and talk about. Most settled on discussing the difference between this convention and the last one held in Chicago: the Democrats' tumultuous visit in 1968.
It just fit so nicely. Everyone's been talking about the apathy among America's youth; contrasting the televised images of Chicago's 1968 kids (shouted protests, bloodied heads) to the 1996 batch (necktied, Macarenaing College Democrats) seemed to prove the point. Those of us in college now simply don't care about the world around us the way the kids of yesteryear did, or so the conventional wisdom goes.
To some degree, that is probably true. We don't involve ourselves in politics the way our parents' generation did. In 1968, Chicago police arrested at least 641 anti-war demonstrators. In 1996, police said they made 30 convention-related arrests, including one for the rebellious act of posting a sign on a lamppost.
Still, I don't attribute our apparent disinterest to apathy, and I certainly don't think we're the worse for it. Our parents may have been more involved politically, but I think we're a whole lot smarter.
In 1968, hundreds if not thousands of students were injured in the streets of Chicago, but to what end? Humphrey still beat out McCarthy for the nomination. Nixon still beat out Humphrey for the White House. Most importantly, despite all of the demonstrations, violence and bloodshed in 1968, U.S. ground troops didn't leave Vietnam until 1973. Sure college students in the '60s protested, but it doesn't seem as though they really accomplished much of anything.
We've learned that lesson, and our nonengagement in traditional "activism" reflects not so much a lack of concern for anything larger than ourselves but the realization that the way to effectively change the system is by working within it, not by attacking it.
Most of the '60s generation has learned that lesson by now, too. Tom Hayden, for example, was one of the Chicago Seven and arrested for conspiracy to start a riot. Today he's a state senator in California. He still fights for liberal ideals--his big causes are education and the environment--but now he does it from inside the system.
Similarly, I know no Stanford students who protested in the streets of Chicago or San Diego this summer, but I do know dozens who learned how to accomplish their political goals. The Stanford students of today did so by interning in House, Senate and agency offices, working at the conventions and, like myself, helping the media keep the country informed.
We know now that the way to change things is to be in a position where you have some real power: from within the political system, from within the media or from within any of the other major institutions that, to varying degrees, control what goes on in this country. Every generation learns that eventually; we've just learned it more quickly than our parents did.
Jesse Oxfeld is a junior from South Orange, N.J., majoring in communication.
