The more our son used words like isolation, escape, and dystopian, the more we compared his coming of age with earlier periods of American history. Our two fathers had both been part of the battle against fascism in World War II. Like others of the baby boomer generation, we’d both grown up connected to major social/political movements—for racial equality, gender equality, and protesting against the Vietnam War—that were far larger than we were as individuals. For our parents and for us, all of these events had occurred within a moral framework. Defeating Hitler was a necessity. Attempting to defeat racism, expand human rights, and end a war that tens of millions of people saw as unjust was as well. The political movements of our youth enforced and reinforced one’s sense of being a member of society with an obligation to fight the just fight. If you participated in them, even in small ways, you were not only supported by huge portions of the culture, but you felt that you were serving the public interest, the common good. Most people who were a part of such movements carried some piece of this with them into the coming decades.
All of this seemed rather obvious—until we began listening to what our son and a number of millennials were telling us. They spoke a lot about the need for social change, but there was little in their culture that provided a framework for these convictions. You could surf the Internet and find small groups who backed anything you felt or believed in, but that wasn’t the same thing as a mass march on Washington or a protest at the Pentagon. At age twenty, it seemed to us, Eric had never taken part in anything that he was certain served a larger or a moral cause. He hadn’t grown up with clear-cut public role models in politics, the media, religion, or elsewhere. For many young people now, he told us more than once, the only such models were action heroes in movies or musicians or sports figures.
And what recent American history had the millennials lived through? What series of events had characterized the formative years of their generation?
As they were becoming more aware of the society they were living in, and as mass shootings began to accumulate into what some called an “epidemic,” the United States was passing through an unprecedented national era. Between 2001 and 2014, our country had come to accept certain things as normal: that a state of war with other parts of the world was a permanent reality; that we could incarcerate (and torture) people indefinitely without giving them due process of law; that all of us—the entire population—was under constant surveillance by our own government; that America was roughly $17 trillion in debt, partly as a result of these wars and that spying; that in the first three months of 2014, the United States saw more than 1,800 of its veterans, many from the current wars, commit suicide; that no one in power, from the top down, had talked about any of this freely or openly in public; and finally, and most importantly, that in the face of these highly complex realities, violence was constantly promoted as the best, if not the only, solution.
“The United States has a lot of built-in cultural violence,” says Mitchell Hall, a Holistic Health & Wellness coordinator and counselor at PsycheHealth, Ltd., in the San Francisco Bay area. “We are by far the most violent developed country in the western world, with ten to twenty times the murder rate of most other similar countries. You can’t divorce these numbers from our political and economic atmosphere. About half of our annual budget as a country goes to the military for warfare. This is our daily reality, the backdrop of our national life. We are paying for the wars of an empire and they are being fought on behalf of that empire. We invade other countries and lies are told to support this.
“Young people see all of the corruption and feel cynicism and despair because they don’t think they have the power to do anything about it. Someone like James Holmes comes along and develops a fantasy of having power, instead of having any actual power over himself or his own life. He was going to make a contribution to neuroscience, until his megalomania took over.
“The changes in our culture need to be systemic. One percent of the American population controls most of the wealth. The people running America are overextended and can’t offer social services to the population. The ruling elite have ever more pervasive means for maintaining this power game and for not setting up a more just society. It all adds up to trouble and it all filters down to the young. Change needs to come on so many levels and in so many domains. The violence of the young keeps telling us this.”
Somebody once said of Ernest Hemingway that he just pointed out what was obvious. And someone else who was more astute said, “Yes, but it only became obvious after he pointed it out.” Something like that process was happening now between us and the millennials we spoke to.
It took us a while to understand what we were hearing from many different angles about our current culture and about how things had changed since when we’d grown up. Then the contrasts began to stand out. In the 1970s, Steve had become a reporter in part because of the Watergate scandal. That event had brought to public awareness a pair of hard-working, courageous, nationally recognized journalistic role models whom one could aspire to learn from and emulate. As important as the reporters themselves, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were the editors of The Washington Post who did not buckle under to pressure from politicians to stop their Watergate investigation.
As a result, abuses of power at the highest levels of government were identified, and serious attempts were made to correct them. People who’d violated the U.S. Constitution or the law went to jail. They were forced to pay the price for lying and deceiving the American population. The truth behind significant corruption came out in very large and very public ways. The press, the Congress, and the judicial branch of government all came together to right a wrong and clean out the stables in Washington. The system worked.
That kind of investigative journalism, supported by the muscle of a major American newspaper, has more or less faded in recent decades. Whistleblowers like Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden who had revealed government spying programs were now accused of crimes by the federal government and were more or less left to face the charges on their own.
What Eric and his friends now had when it came to uncovering the reality behind huge political events was the Internet, with its thousand-plus variations of the truth. And unlike in Watergate, there was very little social and political support for finding that reality. If there were high-ranking American officials who’d engaged in bad behavior in the past thirteen years—or criminal behavior—there had to date been no consequences for them of any kind. One could hardly blame twenty somethings for being cynical or questioning whether their votes even mattered.
People of our son’s generation did not trust the media or the government or any other social institution to ferret out the facts behind our recent history and do something constructive with them. Young people had never actually seen these various safeguarding components work in unison to root out abuse, maintain a balance of power, and serve the overriding public good. Their experience was all about watching a society divide itself against itself, in red versus blue states, the right versus the left, my side is right and yours is wrong. This dynamic now pervaded every aspect of American life, in politics, religion, the media, and the general culture.
Some would argue that these problems had always been with us, and that there was nothing new about what had unfolded in America in the past twenty years. They may have been right, but only up to a point. In earlier times, wars and mass surveillance in the United States had come and gone, but they’d often been met with significant protest. What was different now was that our rich national tradition of dissent—of the questioning of authority by citizens—had all but disappeared, except on the fringes. The fringes were vital and necessary, but rarely impacted mainstream politics and media.
We’ve quietly and passively accepted this new political and emotional reality, largely based upon the constant sense of looming disaster. We tout ourselves as the most powerful nation on earth, but we are always about to be attacked or crushed by some force that is worse than anything America had endured in the past. We are always about to be victimized by something beyond our control—a mindset that had not applied when we were defeating Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan (in just over three and a half years), or sending a man to the moon (in just over eight years), or fighting for equal rights for all citizens.
While all of this raised many issues and questions, one in particular begged to be addressed: What had these developments and this atmosphere wrought on those born in the late 1980s and 1990s?
When Eric was visiting from college, he told us a story about how after September 11, 2001, the administration of a prominent liberal university in the western United States had sent out a directive to its faculty: Because of the sensitivity of this event, the directive said, refrain from talking about it in the classroom. This information had been relayed to Eric by a professor who was given the directive, and years later the teacher was still affected by it.
“What this really does is undermine critical thought,” the professor had said to Eric. “The whole point of a discipline like political science or history or sociology is to do exactly the opposite. When something like this happens, it makes critical thinkers start to worry about the reach of power on campuses. It puts a chill on the kind of environment that saw the Free Speech Movement and the war protests of the 1960s. Power can be measured by the limits of what is allowed to be talked about.”
The firmness of this order came as a shock to numerous instructors, but they obeyed. Doing otherwise was too risky, yet some never forgot the feeling of being told to keep silent about things that changed the course of United States, if not world, history.
One of them later said, “Talking about what’s happening in our society is what we do. It made me question my job and my value as an educator. A university is supposed to be a sanctuary for critical thought.”
The ban on open public discourse lasted for a very long time. In December 2014, more than thirteen years after this directive came down, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 534-page report—the first-ever public accounting of the CIA’s use of torture on al-Qaida detainees held in secret facilities in Europe and Asia after September 11, 2001. We could finally talk in the media and beyond, and we could finally think critically about what had unfolded in secret “black sites” around the world, under orders from the American government. We could at last consider the cost of all this officially sanctioned violence, from the top down.
Only days after this report was released, Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, brought forth more information that he pointed to as evidence that the Bush Administration had willfully misled the nation in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Speaking on the Senate floor, Levin outlined a 2003 CIA cable warning the George W. Bush administration against making claims that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech Republic before September 11, 2001. Instead of taking this advice, Levin stated, Bush officials used this unconfirmed meeting to link Iraq to 9/11 and thereby to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
“There was,” Levin said, “a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq in the public mind with the horror of the September 11 attacks. That campaign succeeded.” He cited opinion polls from that time demonstrating that many Americans believed that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks on the United States. “Of course,” Levin said, “connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al-Qaida were fiction.”
These two Senate actions, coming back to back, were a sea change from the collective passivity that had preceded them for more than a decade. Was it possible that the dam of fear and silence was finally cracking and falling apart?
On December 22, 2014, The New York Times editorial board went even further, calling for an investigation and prosecution of those in the George W. Bush administration who sanctioned torture. The board wrote, “Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.”
Nothing like this had ever happened before in our son’s lifetime. The adult world had finally started to puncture the moral vacuum, a desolate space that included James Holmes.