The usual pathway to your 8:30 a.m. Chinese Literature class is blocked by a score of students diving into piles of fake money to protest income inequality. The five bucks you spent on a front-row ticket to see a prolific arch-conservative guest lecturer goes to waste when the event is abruptly cancelled due to a safe-space violation. The Halloween costume you planned to wear to conceal the after-effects of two straight months of partying is deemed off-limits on the count of being culturally unaware.
Welcome to college, where it’s become just about impossible to maneuver without lighting, quelling, spreading or being burned by on-campus fires. (And no, I don’t mean the kind of fires like those started in Duke University East Campus laundry machines.)
The generations before us have played the role of a modern-day Prometheus, gifting us opportunities to light our fires with liberating technology, unorthodox scholastic and career possibilities and endless support. Because our parents often felt impotent or unheard in their rebellious teenaged years, they wanted nothing more than for us to have the opposite experience. The world was prepared to listen to our interests and opinions; it had given us the fire-starting tools to be heard...and then instantly regretted it, as we Doodle-Jumped our responsibilities to nurture and effectively use these means of self-expression. We instead became what is affectionately known as “GenMe”—self-obsessed, self-important and selfish.
For years, our generation tuned out our elders as they railed about the apathetic, entitled nature of today’s youth. A study published in 2013 by Sage Journals concluded that “youth materialism” has increased over the generations, reaching historically high levels amongst millennials, all the while as “work centrality steadily declined, suggesting a growing discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them.” So they had a basis for their concerns.
And yet, it was the youth vote that was undeniably decisive in electing the country’s first African-American president in 2008 and 2012, according to the Center for Research and Information on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. And it is the generation of millennials that is the highest educated and the most incentivized to create success, despite the fact that we are earning less today than previous generations, as average salaries are down almost 10 percent in just a decade. The flammable materials that might have led previous generations to doubt both our interest in the world, as well as in our abilities to shape it have become the means by which we might change everything. Through the power made achievable with social media, endless forms of artistic expression and avant-garde paths within education, we millennials have become confident that we could usher in a new world order and that we, unlike the preceding generation, might be heard.
Today, we arrive on college campuses, and we are heard. It’s an entirely different landscape than that which welcomed our parents’ generation, the result of being trusted with these new powerful means of broadcasting our voices and interconnecting our communities. We’re able to demand conversations with the presidents of our universities, work to effect meaningful change in university policies and protest just about anything without serious interference from authority.
We are the most audible generation since Adam and Eve, and I’ll bet even each of them probably couldn’t wait for the other to shut up.
So, when we demand that “every week a faculty member come forward and publicly admit their participation in racism inside the classroom” in Guilford’s student newspaper, when we claim that the cultural appropriation of cafeteria sushi at Oberlin is a racial microaggression and when we protest that there might be uncomfortable, radical speakers at an “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series at Williams, we are most definitely heard.
In far too many instances, we’ve squandered the chance to most effectively use our millennial gifts in the ignition of worthwhile fires. College campuses have become highly flammable these days; a single thoughtless or reactive spark can easily become a wildfire. We’ve become overeager fire-starters, often using our Promethean fire to mold theologically-dense armor so as to never feel challenged, and to hone misguided spears of protest that miss their chance at effecting change. Those generations who had trusted us to shape the world do, indeed, hear us. And as a result, 21st-century Prometheans call us soft, divisive, querulous, reactive and distracted.
We don’t have a problem of being heard; rather, we have been over-heard, which has stripped the potency of the heat and sight of the flames from our metaphorical fires.
Stiflingly armored and unwisely armed, we have demanded far more than we have seen done. Of the eight demands made by those who occupied Duke’s Allen Building and Abele Quad in April, only two were met: a public apology and amnesty for the occupiers themselves. Despite sit-ins, rallies and the #MillionStudentMarch calling for tuition-free college, GenMe has yet to forge any progress in making it a reality. And there was no victory in causing one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people to quit teaching at Yale while students protested culturally-biased Halloween costumes.
We are heard, but not listened to. Perhaps if we listened to ourselves, we might understand why.
When Prometheus gave humans fire, the Greek god presumably differentiated between its uses: signals, heat, metallurgy, cooking, light, protection, battle, Frankenstein attacks, Khaleesi reveals, even drunken Myrtle Beach bonfires. Understanding the abilities, strength and potential danger of the flame they had been granted, humans went on to create, spread and put out fires in order to serve their various purposes.
We incendiary college students must understand that our passionate actions and reactions on campus are not like those of the generation that came before us, the generation that handed us the torches we often take for granted. We are, indeed, heard. We wield a great deal of power, entrusted to us by a world reliant on our confidence, our drive and our tools. The disconnect lies in our failure to understand that it is the content and the purpose of the fire, not the blaze itself, that determines whether our spark is not merely heard, but is ultimately acknowledged, respected and realized.
Jackson Prince is a Trinity sophomore and editorial page editor.
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