Two months after Sept. 11, Newsweek ran a cover story on the students it dubbed “Generation 9/11.” Seeking a place from which to observe the effects of the terrorist attacks on youth, the magazine’s reporters came to our campus.
This is what one student was quoted as saying in the article: “Our generation, as long as we’ve had an identity, was known as the generation that had it easy. We had no crisis, no Vietnam, no Martin Luther King, no JFK. We’ve got it now. When we have kids and grandkids, we’ll tell them that we lived through the roaring ’90s, when all we cared about was the No. 1 movie or how many copies an album sold. This is where it changes.”
Most of us graduating now were still in high school when that issue hit newsstands, and perhaps a few of us came to college expecting the sobered-up atmosphere that student’s quote implies. Yet it turns out that Sept. 11 didn’t change everything, at least for most of us. We came to the University, we got our degrees and we’ll go on with our lives.
Having worked at a newspaper, I pay altogether too much attention to current events, and I can’t help noticing that we’re living in historic times – globally and locally. Depending on whom you talk to, America is either locked in a death struggle against radical Islam or is rapidly throwing away its civil liberties and respect for the rule of law in the name of security. Either way, America is still stuck in a rather unpleasant situation in Iraq.
Here on campus, the past four years saw a protracted debate about the University’s admissions policies, capped at each end by the decision at the U.S. Supreme Court in June of 2003 and the passage of Proposal 2 last fall. No matter what you think about affirmative action, you couldn’t avoid the issue.
The state of Michigan, meanwhile, is simply dying. The most recent deadlock over how to deal with the perpetual deficit in the state budget looks more like the decline of a critically ill patient going into shock than any sort of rational democratic process. And there’s no end in sight to the state’s economic collapse. Cuts to state funding translated nicely into hefty tuition hikes. Nobody said creative destruction was fun.
But life goes on. We find our internships, we boost our r