The War of My Generation

David Kieran

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813575711
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Following the 9/11 attacks, approximately four million Americans have turned eighteen each year and more than fifty million children have been born. These members of the millennial and post-millennial generation have come of age in a moment marked by increased anxiety about terrorism, two protracted wars, and policies that have raised questions about the United States's role abroad and at home. Young people have not been shielded from the attacks or from the wars and policy debates that followed. Instead, they have been active participants—as potential military recruits and organizers for social justice amid anti-immigration policies, as students in schools learning about the attacks or readers of young adult literature about wars.  The War of My Generation is the first essay collection to focus specifically on how the terrorist attacks and their aftermath have shaped these new generations of Americans. Drawing from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and literary studies, the essays cover a wide range of topics, from graphic war images in the classroom to computer games designed to promote military recruitment to emails from parents in the combat zone. The collection considers what cultural factors and products have shaped young people's experience of the 9/11 attacks, the wars that have followed, and their experiences as emerging citizen-subjects in that moment. Revealing how young people understand the War on Terror—and how adults understand the way young people think— The War of My Generation offers groundbreaking research on catastrophic events still fresh in our minds.   

Part I

Experiences and Attitudes of the 9/11 Generations

1

Starship Troopers, School Shootings, and September 11

Changing Generational Consciousnesses and Twenty-First-Century Youth

Holly Swyers

In 2011, as the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 loomed, one question frequently repeated in US media was how to talk to children about the events of that day in 2001. The media conversation was couched in a tone of near surprise; as one blogger observed: “A story on my local NPR station this morning reminded me of something I’d not yet really been aware of: kids up to 8th grade don’t really remember 9/11.”1 The discovery that “for most students, the memories will primarily be secondhand stories. To them, 9/11 is history,” prompted much reflection on media exposure, changes in US culture, and sudden awareness of how quickly an event can become history.2 Should people shield their children from the inevitable replay of the images of jetliners plowing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center? For children in their teens, would the images trigger forgotten traumas? As Brodsky Schur commented in an article by Scientific American writer, Katherine Harmon, “Even now . . . seeing footage of the Twin Towers in flames . . . children might wonder: ‘Is this happening now? All over again?’”3

I watched this discussion unfold in the media as a college professor teaching a first-year seminar on social memory. Unsurprisingly, when assigned to develop a final project on an event that produced social memory, one group of students elected to research 9/11. As they presented their project in December, I confess to my own sudden awareness of history. My students chose to focus on their own generation’s social memory of 9/11. Using their own memories as a starting point, they described common motifs of confusion around what they thought was a movie trailer that kept playing, unexpectedly shortened school days, and most poignantly, the vivid memories of their parents crying. The students explained that they realized that “a shocking event that we could not fully grasp and comprehend happened.” What meaning did they ascribe to the events ten years later? They agreed that September 11 was a drastic event that had changed their worlds, but they differed in their interpretations, ranging from “no matter who you are or where you’re from, someone doesn’t like you and wants to see you fall,” to “it was a horrible, horrible, tragic event that was used by the government as the perfect excuse to start a war.” They recognized that within their small group, their perspectives varied according to their geographic proximity to Ground Zero in New York City, and that their understandings of what 9/11 meant were shaped by how their later education helped them make sense of the strong yet confused impressions left in their then eight-to-nine-year-old minds.

This set of reactions was jarring to me, in large part because my college teaching career began in the fall of 2001. That fall, in the days after September 11, I was confronted with a very different set of reactions from students, all of whom were around the same age as the students in my then just-concluding dissertation research on American high-school culture. Both my new college students and the high-school students with whom I was working baffled me in an entirely different way than their juniors would in 2011. Rather than seeing a world suddenly full of “haters” of the United States and cynical uses of power, my 2001 students were perplexed by the reactions of adults to the attacks. Many of them reflected with anxiety on what they saw as a xenophobic kind of patriotism inflecting the new “war on terror” unfolding around them. If there was hating going on, by their logic, it was on the part of older Americans connecting acts of terror to all Muslims. With the exception of those from the poorest inner-city areas and isolated rural communities—particularly those with little to no racial integration—the idea of someone being categorizable as “enemy” on the basis of some preexisting trait was generally viewed as abhorrent and beyond comprehension for the young Americans I worked with in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But why was the idea so incomprehensible? The 1990s were not absent of examples of group hatred that students would have heard about. Both the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides had made headlines in the United States in the mid-1990s. The students had been taught about the Holocaust and the American Jim Crow era. Yet to their minds, it seemed such examples were evidence of “backward” thinking no longer possible in what they saw as the enlightened post–civil rights America in which they grew up. When first confronted by these ideas from my students, I saw them as charmingly naive, although I also saw them as a reason for hope. In the aftermath of September 11, I comforted myself by looking to my students and seeing in them a willingness to think deeply about causes and to think critically about received wisdom. I also fell into the trap of assuming that the views I was hearing from my students reflected a general trend of youth, not realizing until my student presentations in 2011 that what I was witnessing was a particular generational moment produced by a specific convergence of world historical events and American educational goals of the 1990s. I have since concluded that a small slice of Americans, primarily born in the 1980s, represent what Raili Nugin referred to as a “sandwich generation.”4 Fitting neither the media-generated view of Generation X nor of millennials, this subset of Americans could be viewed as existing in an “intermediate zone”5 between generations. However, as Nugin pointedly asks, “Do we, as researchers, have the capacity to label an age group as a twilight or intermediate generation, if the members of the birth cohort clearly feel they form a separate generation?”6 I argue that Americans who were between the ages of about fourteen and twenty-three on September 11, 2001, experienced the events of that day through a generationally specific worldview created by the historical conditions, policy decisions, and general cultural milieu in which they were raised. Their experience has been elided by media narratives of American generational dynamics, but closer examination of this cohort can help us think more carefully about the circumstances that create generational self-awareness and the consequences for potential social change.

My method of argument entails a mix of ethnographic vignettes, reviews of changing educational and geopolitical policy in the 1990s, media examples, and historical reflection. Going back over my field notes from 1998 through 2003 and reviewing the work of Karl Mannheim and others, I trace out the way in which Americans born in the 1980s, like the Estonians born in the 1970s that Nugin studied, experienced “rapid changes in socialization patterns and memory,”7 which leave them distinct from members of the immediately preceding generation (Generation X), but not entirely in tune with the teens coming of age in the 2010s.8 Will they continue to exist as a “generation in actuality” as described by Karl Mannheim, with a “concrete bond . . . [formed] by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic destabilization”?9 Or has a moment of unique generational consciousness (“entelechy” in Mannheim’s conceptualization) been swallowed up by social change proceeding at “too greatly accelerated a tempo,” leading to “destruction of embryo entelechies”?10 There is not yet enough historical distance to say, but I contend that for Americans coming of age in the few years to either side of 2001, the war of their generation was experienced in distinctly different ways than it was by other Americans. This difference is one with generative potential, producing not just different ways of seeing events, but also a range of potential responses and long-term decision making that could, if allowed to foment, produce novel solutions to the challenges of the twenty-first century. However, the potential for unique and possibly impasse-breaking insight can as easily be subsumed in our cultural rush to generalize about young Americans of the twenty-first century, leaving a substantial portion of that population feeling misunderstood and voiceless. If for only this reason, the social forces producing generational consciousness deserve our attention against the facile idea that arbitrary twenty-year spans distinguish one generational from another.

September 11

To begin to grasp the distinctiveness of the generational mindset I have encountered, it is best to start from my field notes in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. On September 14, 2001, I was sitting in the library of the high school where I had been doing fieldwork for a year and a half. There were perhaps ten of us gathered around a round table, talking in hushed tones but with great intensity. It had taken us forty minutes of careful conversation, veiled questions, and hinted perspectives to get to what we all wanted to talk about: the events of September 11. The students gathered around were a study of urban diversity. They included immigrants from Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Mexico, as well as American-born Latinos and African Americans. At least two of the students had close family members who had been working in the World Trade Center on September 11, all of whom had fortunately survived the attack and subsequent building collapse. The students were shocked and scared, as were many people throughout the United States. For the immigrant students, the shock and fear were almost more palpable than that expressed by the American-born teens at the table. There were obvious causes for concern regarding potential changes in Immigration and Naturalization Service policies, but their worries ran to something even deeper. This particular set of immigrant students had consciously embraced the “American Dream”—one had even been instrumental in persuading her parents to immigrate to the United States. The symbolic value of the attacks of September 11 was not lost at all on them: had they pinned their hopes on an idea and ideal that might have been destroyed?

They also, however, had quickly discovered that there was little space in school or in their neighborhoods to talk about what had happened. Only three days after the World Trade Center collapsed, they had figured out that there were limits to the ways they could express their worries. They could be shocked, yes. They could be confused. They could fear for their lives. They could not, however, be “unpatriotic.” They could not ask how the events of September 11 might have been a response to American foreign policy. They could not be too vocal about their fear and disappointment at the surge in racist and anti-Islamic rhetoric. They could ask if the United States had been irrevocably changed, but they could not question whether that change was for the better.

The students spent a half hour sounding me out before they began to tell me these things, this despite the fact that many of them had known me for long enough to predict my reaction. Most conversations would start around the personal dimensions of the tragedy, generally accompanied with a sense of relief that the hurdle of starting the discussion was over. With few exceptions, however, the tension would begin building almost immediately as the students broached some variant of three questions: Why did it happen? What’s the government doing? And what did I think about it? These questions were almost always preceded by decreasing eye contact and more guarded scrutiny of my face. The uneasiness from that point continued in each conversation until I made any comment that expressed my concern for potential ethnic persecution or my interest in making sure we were sure of the who and why of the attacks before the United States reacted.

Once I had made such a comment, the floodgates would open, and the young people began pouring out concerns about racial/ethnic profiling, mischaracterizations of Islam, their fears that striking back would only escalate other nations’ hatreds of Americans, their concern that we might dishonor America’s place as an international role model if we reacted the wrong way. Similar ideas show up in their peers’ reflections on 9/11. A survey conducted by Patricia Somers at the University of Texas-Austin of students at five universities who had been in high school at the time of 9/11 revealed that 45 percent of students reported feeling a “direct reaction of anger toward the U.S. government and the media” in response to 9/11.11 One blogger, an undergraduate at Columbia University in 2001, wrote, “Days after the attack, the Village Voice put out a cover showing the second plane hitting the towers, under the headline, ‘THE BASTARDS!’ I remember a friend angrily objecting that this was irresponsible, that it would foment anti-Muslim feeling.”12

When this discussion about negative American reactions emerged in a one-on-one setting, I found I could scarcely get a word in edgewise. In small group settings, students talked almost over one another, building on each other’s points, and when in a semipublic place (i.e., the school library), the conversation at this point would draw in more students. While the teens I talked to expressed a belief that the people who were responsible for the acts needed to be found and punished, they also wanted to make sure we discovered what grievance was so great that it would prompt someone to die and kill for it. If we could understand and resolve the grievance, they thought, we would prevent future attacks. The nuance of their arguments and their willingness to see multiple sides of the story defy contemporary readings of so-called millennials as entitled, self-centered narcissists.13 Their engagement in debates beyond those perceived as “allowed” also defies earlier descriptions of 1990s youth as characterized by “apathy, alienation, and disaffection.”14

Some of their comments seemed cavalier. One high-school student I talked to opined: “The best way to deal with these things is get back to normal as fast as possible; you can’t know when they’re going to happen.” Lest this response be read too much as a reflection of George...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “The War of My Generation”
• Part I: Experiences and Attitudes of the 9/11 Generations
• Part II: Post-9/11 Militarism in Old and New Media
• Part III: Coming of Age Stories and the Representation of Millennial Citizenship during the War on Terror
• Part IV: Politics and Pedagogy
• Afterword: Scholarship on Millennial and Post-Millennial Culture during the War on Terror: A Bibliographic Essay
• List of Contributors
• Index