Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 15, 1993 TAG: 9307150163
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
"The task of lobbying for the future has fallen on our shoulders," Douglas Kennedy, the 26-year-old son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, declared at a news conference with 39 other founders of Third Millennium, the organization they hope will rally their generation.
Reminiscent of the Port Huron Statement that propelled Tom Hayden and other founders of the Students for Democratic Society to political prominence in 1962, the Third Millennium Declaration is intended as a political wake-up call to Americans born between 1961 and 1981 - dubbed "Generation X" by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland.
"This is not a test - this is an S.O.S.," said Rob Nelson, 29, co-founder of "Lead or Leave," a youth organization financed in part by Ross Perot. "Our generation is in peril."
While it is long on diagnosis of the nation's problems - a mounting national debt, out-of-control crime, declining school quality, racism, environmental damage and a sluggish economy - the Third Millennium Declaration is short on prescriptions to cure them.
Its most specific proposal is cutting spending for government programs that benefit the elderly, beginning with Social Security, which it labels "a generational scam."
Most of the manifesto focuses on the national debt and is peppered with accusations that the "baby boom" and World War II generations of Americans have practiced "fiscal child abuse" by piling up budget deficits.
"We've had enough," said Jonathan Karl, 25, a writer with Freedom House, a human rights organization in New York. "This country has gone Chapter 11 and it's time to restructure. It's not arrogance on our part. It's urgency."
There is considerable evidence, however, that few people between the ages of 20 and 29 feel the same urgency.
In the last presidential election, for example, only 36.8 percent of "Generation X" voted, compared to the national average of 55.2 percent, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
In the previous presidential election, only 29 percent of "Generation X" voted.
"People do not get involved politically because they are a certain age," Curtis Gans, the committee's director, said in an interview. "They get involved because they there is a cause or an issue they believe in."
But Robert Lukefahr, 29, of Sterling, Va., a Third Millennium co-founder, said the newly formed organization would move beyond traditional partisan politics in its bid for political power.
"We intend to shed the politics of yesterday . . . because both parties have failed us," Lukefahr added.
by CNB