Talkin' About Your Generation
Mary Sanchez

Lately, I find it necessary to restrain my inner curmudgeon when speaking to young adults about politics.

Put me in a roomful of educated, middle-class twentysomethings holding forth on their liberal views and my brow furrows and my jaw clenches.

This might come as a shock to regular readers of my column.

It's not that I disagree with their views they express or that I find them insufficiently articulate or passionate. They have these qualities, often in spades.

Ask them about the latest kerfuffle in the culture wars and prepare yourself for the disdain of the enlightened. They'll give you that "you're kidding me" roll of the eyes they reserve for middle-aged adults still stuck on issues they feel are largely resolved.

Here's one that flat out makes them howl with laughter: the idea that you can "pray away the gay" in people. This stuff strikes them as absurd; they have friends who are out of the closet, studying alongside them in class. They also have countless sexually active peers who take the pill or use condoms.

They are refreshingly unperturbed by the anxieties that columnists and talking heads of my generation make into hobbyhorses. Pew Research Center has reported that 18- to 29-year-olds view gay couples raising children, unwed people cohabiting or parenting children together with a statistical shrug. They simply don't see these trends as harmful to society.

The same polling also found they value parenthood highly, and the vast majority say they want to have children and marry, but they will likely do it later than past generations.

In other words, the 18- to 29-year-olds of the millennial generation have fine instincts.

What bothers me is that the issues that set them off, and the way they react, are exactly what you'd expect of young adults raised with relative privilege who seem to have no reason to fear that their lives will lack for a certain level of comfort. But they do have reason to fear.

My reply has become this: These culture war issues aren't the challenges that will matter to your generation. Your generation's fate is being decided right now in all this hubbub in Congress about the debt ceiling and taxes and spending cuts and entitlement "reform" and health care "reform." And, by the way, what do you think about all that?

Blank stares.

Don't get me wrong: The so-called social and cultural issues are important. I suspect that by the time these young people are middle-aged and presumably have gained a level of social capital and economic clout, many of these societal shifts will not longer be controversial.

But I worry what they are not seeing with their oh-so-tolerant eyes.

Sure, they wax on about getting beyond racism. And they are adept in the language and gestures of diversity, often showing off the evidence of their enlightenment with racially diverse selections of music in their iPods.

But they don't seem to grasp is the complex and enduring interconnection of race and class. They are unaware that a wealth gap is widening between the races and is greater than it has been at any time in the past quarter century. As reported by Pew in July, the median wealth in white households is 20 times that of African Americans and 18 times that of Hispanics.

What do they think is fueling this trend, and what can be done? Is it a good thing that income and wealth distribution in America is polarizing?

More blank stares.

We've been hearing an earful lately about the sort of world that will be left to succeeding generations. That sort of rhetoric featured prominently the recent debt limit fight in Congress.

What I don't often hear is young people grasping how it's them -- their generation -- whose fate at 65 or 70 is being decided by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and Barack Obama. They face catastrophe if medical inflation is not controlled now. They will face personal adversity if the political class of today decides we can do away with the social safety net.

Despite our current recession, the worst since the Great Depression, the existential threats to the U.S. economy and way of life will not arise in the next decade. The baby boomers will retire and be cared for in precisely the way they were promised.

No, the potential calamity will befall those that come after. They need to get ready.

Twitter: @ihavenet

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