Defending Our Generation

HOW many times have we heard it before? The alleged slogan of the "younger generation" is "MAKE BUCKS, NOT LOVE." The younger generation is marked by materialism, "somberness," and "deglandularization." We have no passion. We have no idealism. We have no politics. Last week, Michael Blumenthal joined the ever-growing consensus that all us '80s kids are unromantic, apathetic, "dollar-sniffing" jerks.

It's no surprise that nostalgia will cause a baby boomer to fall in line with the dominant stereotype of the youth of today and decry the greedy, "antiseptic" state of the students he teaches. This shallowness is pretty standard in anything written lately about the "younger generation." It is a little strange, however, to see such a cursory treatment of the literature Professor Blumenthal, a teacher of poetry here, amply quotes.

I'LL start with Shakespeare: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" is one of the more romantic lines of the more romantic sonnets of Shakespeare. Blumenthal uses the line as a possible theme for the '80s generation, one that refuses to idealize love and lovers. The poem goes on to list a variety of perfect qualities the mistress (or possibly, male lover) does not have.

But the poem ends with the couplet, "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/ as any she belied with false compare." Shakespeare says that it is not more romantic to idealize some creep than to love someone for one's imperfections. Didn't Blumenthal get to the end of the sonnet? Isn't it a good thing to look below the surface?

And given Blumenthal's acknowledged voyeurism, is it unreasonable to expect students to have sex outside of his line of vision? More seriously, Blumenthal ignores the effects the AIDS epidemic has had on our public and private displays of affection, homosexual or heterosexual. His disappointment with students' apparent willingness to quit their mates ignores the role women's liberation has played in changing the notion of marriage from a result of economic necessity to an instrument of a happier life. Isn't the latter worth waiting for?

In quoting the "younger" (or in his terms, "their") generation, Blumenthal is even more carless. Tracy Chapman epitomizes our greedy decade with the line "If not now...when?" I'm hard-pressed to find a clearer example of quoting out of context. Hasn't Michael Blumenthal heard that Chapman, a folksinger, is "talkin 'bout a revolution"?

Since it's too hard to believe that Blumenthal could misread or mishear this badly, I can only conclude that he thinks his readers are illiterate and/or deaf. Well, we're not. We recognize a misquote when we see it, and we recognize a mud-slinging at our collective character when we read it.

IT certainly wasn't current college students who voted Reagan into office in 1980, when post-baby boomers were just hitting adolescence. We're the selfish brutes who in our first presidential elections voted for Mike Dukakis, now in disgrace for trying to repair the Massachusetts economy.

We're not responsible for the incredible increase of poverty in the '80s; however, we are trying to do something about it. While '60s-style, one-weekend demonstrations have declined in frequency, the amount of volunteer work Harvard students do has increased about 500 percent in the last 25 years.

Is the decline of flashy idealism always a bad thing? When non-public, painstaking, and long-term commitment to individuals or even to "progress" takes the place of a few shouts in the street, the younger generation is sweepingly condemned for apathy.

I don't want to fall into the trap of saying that the '60s generation was really a selfish, flashy, repressed, hypocritical one, and that the '80s generation is full of sweetness and light. Many of us don't see our world as the best of all possible ones, just like many of the '60s generation didn't see theirs as perfect either.

The '60s generation did teach us, however, that the world can't be changed by our attendance, however passionate, at a rock concert or even at a draft-card burning. The new style of protest is different, and it's hidden, but it exists. It should be encouraged and expanded, not condemned.

What I object to is the idea that an entire generation born in 1968 and after are all self-serving snobs, while the generation born in the 1950s are all altruistic angels. The habit of generation-naming has become so widespread as to be harmful. Characterizing the '80s as the age of greed totally effaces the behind-the-scenes, unpublic sacrifices made by, for example, child abuse workers, drug counselors, AIDS-hotline staffers, soup-kitchen servers and so on.

SURE, our attitudes can obviously be improved. Many more people, for example, should want to be drug counselors. But the same number of investment-banking jobs are out there as before. Certainly, now that sex is not the same sanctioned, repressed activity that it was twenty years ago, romance has just changed its location from public space to private bedroom. If the press and the '60s generation is giving the wrong impression, what can our slandered generation do? Only hope that not everyone believes everything he or she reads.