It had to happen. Kids of baby boomers differentiating themselves were a train-wreck waiting to happen. Most of us thought it would be a rerun of what set us apart from our own parents. And it is, except that most of us aren’t paying close enough attention. First it was the music; now it’s support for U.S. unilateral military action against foreign countries. It would appear we’ve raised a pack of war-mongers.
According to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Research Note, entitled “Generations divide over military action in Iraq,” current college students support military action against Iraq by a three-to-one margin (69% - 23%). That’s pretty damn shocking. Until you realize that today’s college students were born between 1984 - 1988. Switching to my old fart’s voice it’s easy to rail about how college-age kids today were all born during the period when we all learned business skills from the school of Gordon “greed is good” Gekko. Until very recently, they’ve never seen a down market, let alone our nation at war. Yeah, there was the Persian Gulf War, but these kids weren’t even teenagers then and probably saw it mostly as a crappy video game compliments of the wall-to-wall cable news coverage.
But then the scales fall from my eyes and I remember that I was outside of the mainstream during the Vietnam era as well. Back then, as the Pew Research Center Note makes clear, “young people also supported military action at higher levels than older Americans.”
We all see life through our own filters. During the height of the Vietnam War, I was of draft age. I didn’t know anyone my age who supported the war, but it turns out the circle of people I knew must have been as narrow as it was shallow. The Pew Note reports that by May 1970, the majority of Americans (56%) felt that military involvement in Vietnam had been a mistake. But at university campuses—almost all of which were hosting widespread political protests—students were divided almost evenly: 49% of students were against involvement; 48% supported it.
According to the Pew Note, fully 94% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats younger than 30 support military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power. That might go a long way in explaining yesterday’s mid-term election results.
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