Posted by
Angelina Sciolla on Thursday, February 28, 2008 10:59:41 AM
“The younger generation sees itself as a multicultural generation,” said DNC Chairman Howard Dean at the NAACP meeting yesterday. “People under 35 think of themselves differently, and feel integrated [in society].”
So what do people over 35 think they are. Segregated?
I mean think of the intellectual bankruptcy of that statement. The uselessness of it....if only WF Buckley were alive to hear it. Imagine the excoriating (and largely incomprehensible to we mere mortals) reply that gem of a quote would have received.
Dean's comments came in the wake of his criticism of John McCain, who he sees as an old fogie with Bush plague. I have news for Dr. Dean, baby boomer. People over 35 dominate the political and economic spectra. They have the money, the power and the pharmaceuticals to keep themselves going way into their 80s and 90s.
Don't be dissing older people, man. They are the future - good or bad. Baby boomers are hitting retirement. There will be an unprecedented burden on entitlement programs for seniors which will translate into a serious economic issue for this country. (This is not an assertion of blame on people who happened to be born between 1945 and 1962. It's a fact.)
Dean's comment is also kind of flabby for another reason. In what generation did people under 35 not think of themselves differently than their predecessors? Every generation spends part of its time self-indulging, self-assessing and blaming the generation before. It's just the human right of passage. It's not an indicator of some transcendental moment in American politics. It would be a transcendental moment if campaigns and debates had some kind of intellectual integrity to them. As for this "multicultural" assertion? That is something that will (and in many ways already has) come back to bite the youngsters in the you-know-what. Multiculturalism is a myth, a feel-good academic term like "post-racial" (see my previous post). We are a country of different ethnic groups wherein thrive different languages, customs and traditions. But the ethos of America is established and recognizable. So is the language.
But the myth lives on amid the glamour of the "tossed salad" metaphor that has usurped the "melting pot." Check out this strongly worded statement by a young lady who was responding to a USA Today article that touched upon the idea of assimilation into American society. Be warned, old folks, Howard Dean is not your only adversary.
"Obviously, old people are not post-racial. For one thing the don't possess the conceptual apparatus for it and couldn't be if they wanted to. But they will die out. Post-racialism won't becoming prevalent by winning on the battlefield of ideas. Rather, the old people opposed to it will simply die off. In the meantime, younger people, for whom it is all they know, will just accept it as being completely "natural." For the moment, in racialist contexts, around old people, in schools, prisons, etc, they PRETEND to be as racialist as their parents and grandparents, but in their hearts they don't actually believe in it at all. Old people fall for this pretending and think their old ways have been preserved.
This is a fundamental change, and it has already happened. There is no turning back on this one. And frankly, I've been waiting all my life for it. Obama's candidacy is merely the final touch on a social change which has at last been realized. As a Jamaican-born, polyglot, multiracial American with a Czech mother, mulatto grandfather, and a hindu nephew and niece who speak spanish at home, I am looking forward to voting for a half-Kenyan from Hawaii who speaks fluent Indonesian.
It's our turn now.