Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 28, 1990 TAG: 9006280233
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL ORESKES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: COLUMBUS, OHIO LENGTH: Long
The cashier, a man a bit younger than Karras, looked up at the radio and said: "I wish they'd stop talking about it. I'm sick of hearing about it."
Karras, a doctoral student in education at Ohio State, recalled this incident to illustrate what he sees as a "pervasive" attitude among the members of his generation toward the larger world. Young people don't want to hear about it, he said, "unless it's knocking on my door."
The findings of two national studies concur. The studies, one released Wednesday and the other late last year, paint a portrait of a generation of young adults, from 18 to 29 years of age, who are indifferent toward public affairs.
It is a generation that, as the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press put it in a report released Wednesday, "knows less, cares less, votes less and is less critical of its leaders and institutions than young people in the past."
Caught in the backwash of the baby boom, whose culture and attitudes still dominate American discourse, members of the "baby bust" seem almost to be rebelling against rebellion. Anyone who was hoping that the energy of this new generation would snap the nation out of its political lethargy, as young people helped awaken the nation from the quiescent 1950s, will probably be disappointed.
"My teacher told me: `Always question authority,' " said Paul Grugin, 22, one of two dozen young people interviewed this week by The New York Times in this mid-size city in the middle of the country. "You can question authority, but you can burden authority. Let them authoritate."
The indifference of this generation - to politics, to government, even to news about the outside world - is beginning to affect American politics and society, the reports suggest, helping to explain such seemingly disparate trends as the decline in voting, the rise of tabloid television and the effectiveness of negative advertising.
While apathy and alienation have become a national plague, the disengagement seems to run deeper among young Americans, those 18 to 29, setting them clearly apart from earlier generations.
No one has yet offered a full explanation for why this should be so. The lack of mobilizing issues is part of the answer, as are the decline of the family and the rise of television.
Young people themselves mention the weakness of their civics education, and they talk incessantly of stress - their preoccupation with getting jobs or grades and their concern about personal threats like AIDS and drugs.
"There are a lot more pressures on them than there were on us," said 48-year-old Ron Zeller, who talked about the differences along with his 22-year-old daughter, Susan, and his 18-year-old son, John.
The study by Times Mirror, a public opinion research center supported by Times Mirror Co., looked at 50 years of public opinion data and concluded, "Over most of the past five decades, younger members of the public have been at least as well informed as older people. In 1990 that is no longer the case."
This concern was echoed in a second report, prepared last year by People for the American Way, a liberal lobby and research organization, which concluded that there is "a citizenship crisis" in which "America's youth are alarmingly ill-prepared to keep democracy alive in the 1990s and beyond."
Susan Zeller, 22, who is about to enter Case Western Law School, agreed. "I don't think many people my age group are very concerned," she said. "They're only concerned about issues that affect them. When the drinking age went up, quite a few people were upset."
The decline in voting is one illustration of how what seems to be a general problem is, in fact, most heavily concentrated among the young. Surveys by the Census Bureau show that since 1972 almost all of the decline in voting has been among those under 45, and that the sharpest drop is among those between 18 and 25. Among the elderly, voting has risen, according to the census bureau surveys.
Older people, more settled than the young, have always participated more in elections. But the gap has widened substantially. In 1972, half of those between 18 and 24 said they voted, as did 71 percent of those 45 to 64, a gap of 21 percentage points. In 1988, 36 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds and 68 percent of the 45- to 64-year-olds said they voted, a gap of 32 percentage points.
Shonda Wolfe, 24, who has waited tables since dropping out of college, said she had voted only once, when she was 18 and still living at home. "I guess my mom was there to push me," she said.
Now, she said, she does not pay much attention to politics or to the news. "I try to avoid it - all the controversy," she said. "It just doesn't interest me at this point in my life. I'd rather be outside doing something, taking a walk."
Young people have always had to worry about getting started in life, beginning a career and a family. But this young generation, for whom Vietnam is a history lesson and Watergate a blurry childhood memory, seems to have adopted the cynicism of parents and older siblings without going through the activism and disappointments that produced that cynicism.
Not one of the young people interviewed in Columbus, at the Street Scene Restaurant and the Short North Tavern, had a good word to say about politics or politicians.
But unlike older people, who often express anger about news about sloth or corruption in government, these young people seem simply to be reporting it as a well-known fact. "Most politicians are liars," said Deborah Roberts, a 29-year-old secretary.
People for the American Way, in its report, noted that young people seemed to have a half-formed understanding of citizenship, stressing rights but ignoring responsibilities.
When asked to define citizenship, Shonda Wolfe said it meant the right not to be harassed by the police. She cited as an intrusion on her rights the security guards' insistence at a concert that she and her boyfriend stop turning on their cigarette lighters.
Occasionally, someone in the interviews would mention voting. None of the young people, when asked about citizenship, included in their definition of good citizenship running for office, attending a community board meeting, studying an issue, signing a petition, writing a letter to the governor, or going to a rally.
These young people are aware that some of their attitudes are a product of different times. Young people protesting the war in Vietnam were also engaged by an issue that affected them, but one that the rest of the country also accepted as being of central importance.
"When people your age were our age, there was a lot more strife," Jeff Brodeur, a 22-year-old senior at Ohio State, told a 36-year-old visitor.
Certain issues do get their attention, almost always involving government interference in personal freedoms. They generally favor access to abortion, and a few of the young people were upset by efforts to cut off federal funds for art work deemed obscene.
Their concern about the arts was not surprising because in the interviews the young people showed that their main contact with the larger world was through culture.
Brodeur, for example, said he first became aware of apartheid in South Africa through the song "Biko," written by Peter Gabriel about Steve Biko, a prominent anti-apartheid leader in South Africa of the 1970s.
But Brodeur's research seems more the exception than the rule. Andrew Kohut, director of surveys for Times Mirror, said there was a new generation gap, in which those under 30 were separated by their lack of knowledge and interest from those over 30.
People in their 30s and 40s are disenchanted with the world, but remain aware, said Kohut. But those under 30, he said, "are not so much disillusioned as disinterested."
The Times Mirror analysis was based on its own public opinion polling as well as comparisons with polling conducted by other organizations over the past 50 years.
Deborah Roberts, the secretary, says she still reads a newspaper, sort of. "There's more bad news on the front page," she said, explaining why she skips over it. "I like to go to the local news; it's the fun news."
Attitudes like this are having a considerable effect on the news media, Kohut said. The number of people who read newspapers is declining, in general, but that number has plunged among the young.
And not simply because they have turned to television, according to surveys. Viewing of traditional television news by the young is also shown to be down, although they do watch the new types of shows that concentrate on scandal and celebrity.
"The generation gap in news and information is playing out in politics in very significant ways," Kohut added.
"The 30-second commercial spot is a particularly appropriate medium for the MTV generation," he continued.
"At the conclusion of the 1988 campaign, Times Mirror's research showed that young voters, who began the campaign knowing less than older voters, were every bit as likely to recall advertised political themes such as pollution in Boston Harbor, Willie Horton and the flag.
"Sound bites and symbolism, the principal fuel of modern political campaigns, are well suited to young voters who know less and have limited interest in politics and public policy. Their limited appetites and aptitudes are shaping the practice of politics and the nature of our democracy."
by CNB