Culture » November 30, 2009

Empathy, Not Apathy

An open letter to my students.

By Karla Jay

Dear Students,

Where have we—your elders-failed?

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University uprisings. The students had many grievances, including the university’s attempt to build a private gym in a public park and its involvement in the war in Vietnam, as well as the war itself and the unpopular draft. This year marks the 40th anniversary of both the Stonewall uprising and Woodstock. My involvement with a radical feminist group, Redstockings, also began four decades ago. I emerged from these events and groups as a radical lesbian, feminist and pacifist, committed to a lifetime of global struggle and local issues.

Reflecting back on these catalytic events, I wonder why you, my beloved students in women’s and gender studies at Pace University, aren’t out at the barricades in the fight against the interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread genocidal acts against women, the lack of equality for the queer community and evildoing by the banking industry.

I have tried to interest you in local crises through involvement in community outreach courses in which you work two hours or more per week in battered women’s shelters, at food pantries, in homeless shelters and with underprivileged children. I want you to become the next generation of activists. About one third of you enjoy your stint and get over feeling that community service is for felons. You stay on because you’ve bonded with your new community, knowing deep down that somehow you got more out of it than they did. (When I lost most of my eyesight and became a recipient of social services myself I found out that “it’s easier to give than to receive” is not a cliché but a hard truth.)

It seems to me, that many of you don’t see current “issues” as connected to you. That nothing is “real” unless you’ve seen it on reality TV. The violence in the world can’t match the latest hit film. Since there is no draft, attending college is no longer a prelude to going to Iraq or Afghanistan, except for those on ROTC scholarships. You think feminism is passé. For those of you who are white, racism is over, too, because Obama is president. There is no gender or racial gap at your minimum wage jobs at Abercrombie, The Gap and as student aides, but you haven’t entered the real work force yet. There’s a Stonewall Coalition at the university, but you don’t need that because New York City has so many queer bars and you have the fake I.D. to get in. You’re oh-so-out, though most of you can’t apply the LGBTQ words to yourself in my queer courses.

I observe your lives. You are smart and can do things via computer I can only dream of. But few of you read a newspaper or even online news sites. However, you are constantly texting and twittering—opening e-mail seems too dated. You want the news to be as brief and fast as Twitter; you would like classes to move along in some more amusing format like animé. You avoid doing research if it involves books; the text you read is on your cell.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the street. If Martin Luther King, Jr. had blogged “I have a dream” on Facebook, how many would have twittered back, “Yeah, dude, I had a dream last night, too.”

Life online has turned you away from the world around you. This virtual life is more real to you than planet Earth. As Taylor McHugh, one of my activist students put it, “Students feel apathy, not empathy.”

When I was a student, the mimeo and ditto machines were the closest thing we had to going viral. Maybe some of us went out because we had nothing else to do, but there was only so long we could stay inside scrutinizing our Ché Guevara and Madame Binh posters. It was also so much less dangerous back then to risk losing a college degree over an uprising.

I understand how different your world is from mine. I know how much harder many of your lives are than mine was 40 years ago. My total undergraduate education at Barnard cost approximately $16,000, which my scholarship covered part of. According to US News and World Report, for example, the average indebtedness of a 2008 Pace graduate was $29,622. The minimum wage jobs that I worked at for $4.00 per hour should be $16 by now, not $7. 25. I shared an apartment on the Upper West Side with three other students for under $75 each per month.

I know that some of you have one job on the weekends, another at night; some of you work late as waiters, showing up the next afternoon to class hardly able to stay awake. (I know one of you worked all night at a supermarket, studying by sitting between the plastic bag holders when there were no customers.)

Some of you help support a single mother or siblings, but most of you simply have other priorities. You want things: brand-name clothes and shoes, iPods, iPhones, flat-screen TVs, fast laptops. Acquiring them takes weeks of work. Your drug of choice is consumerism, and you are its slave: You are Gen C, not Gen Y.

If I blame anyone, though, it is my colleagues and those of us on the Left who fail to lead and involve you.

I could blame the recession, but even in times of prosperity, most faculty members teach and go home. For most, there’s no sense of responsibility to students outside the classroom. Some, mostly from the humanities and social sciences, supported an SDS uprising against Pace University’s former president a few years back and helped oust him. It’s easier and more lucrative for faculty to research, teach extra courses or become a consultant on the side. For some, teaching IS the other job.

We on the Left haven’t done our jobs. Some organizations, such as the Left Forum, Third Wave Feminism and NARAL, encourage on-campus recruitment and participation. But we probably would be appalled if our students wanted to do more than simply support our efforts. We have not encouraged them to become leaders, instead of followers. In our early twenties, many of us founded or led organizations. Now we are still leading them, while the young remain powerless. They are the new women, relegated to making sandwiches and answering phones or e-mail rather than taking charge. The more Left groups became organized, the less the young were to be found in the hierarchy. Many groups suffer from “founders’ syndrome,” in which the original leaders are still there and not planning to step aside any time soon.

If we cherish our goals more than our own prowess, it is time for activists and tenured radicals to see ourselves as mentors and partners rather than leaders. This is how I now approach education, but shifting my attitude meant that I had to relinquish much of my power in the classroom. And that in turn has forced the students to take charge of some of the teaching, to abandon their comfortable passivity. It was and still is scary for all of us to some degree, but my battle-wise colleagues and comrades need to understand not only how much we can teach the young, but also how much we can learn from them if we will only listen. 

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!
• Or win a subscription to In These Times by taking this short survey!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  very thought-provoking. In fact, its inspired me to write a piece that I’ll try to circulate if I do get around to it. its on the “mea culpa” meme that I’m starting to see emerge from older activists. as a younger person who isnt waiting around for things to get better, I appreciate where you land, but I do have some questions and thoughts on some of the other substance in your piece.
  __________________________________________________
  “You want the news to be as brief and fast as Twitter; you would like classes to move along in some more amusing format like animé. You avoid doing research if it involves books; the text you read is on your cell. “
  __________________________________________________

  I have to say that I agree with the line of thinking that sees technology as a tool of a function, rather than as the function itself. In terms of your piece, I do think you’re right to say that there is a danger in technology if it does in fact seperate people from reality and what’s going on, but in my opinion that isnt quite what’s happening.

  imho, technology is connecting people to what they want to be connected to. Not surprisingly, its not to mass/radical change organizations or causes, and that’s because we generally don’t have them, and the ones we do have tend to be very local or disconnected from online venues (in terms of organizing through that medium). This to me raises questions about the state of the movement and not about the state of young America. But that’s a different topic I won’t get into it as I’ll never shut up…(but PS, we do need a new or updated ideology already… gotta lose the fear of being radical and pissing ppl off, capitalism changed, why havent we?)

  I have to say what’s wrong with news as quick and fast as twitter? I use it all the time, and I like to think that I get my point across. Granted its not to state a major thesis or idea, but no one asked me for that in the first place. I’m ranting now, but damn haven’t we all been to a place or seen something on TV where someone just went on too long? Sometimes 125 symbols can better capture what’s going on than an elloquent explanation. To me the perfect example of this is the current financial crisis. Everyone knows that sh** went terribly wrong, and I see all these folks writing 4-5 page articles on the crisis, what went wrong, and what they suggest ppl should do.

  Why couldnt someone have said. “Folks, you just got jacked, its like monopoly but we’re the losers, and if you wanna take the board back you need to roll with me” (ok that was more than 125 characters)

  
  I also think that anime draws ppl in because its one of the few outlets where there actually is a purity of ideas and thought. Week after week I find myself gulping down a few episodes of Naruto Shippuden, Lost Canvass, or some other manga/anime because I sometimes need to recharge some emotional batteries. In the real world, I dont see leaders of organizations articulating their “ultimate belief”, and being willing to fight/die for it. Nope, all compromises, all the time. I find more inspiration to continue from a cartoon than real ppl, and I doubt I’m the only one. That’s not to say that there arent amazing and inspiring ppl out there, but they arent the leaders of these large orgs out there (as your article mentions). I’ve actually talked to rank-n-filers, who are young, about an anime piece or mash-up that contrasted what our believes are to anime, and have gotten some of the biggest smiles/reactions when I’ve said that… it made me think maybe there was something to it.
  _______________________________________________

  anyway, I really appreciated your writing, and I have to say its not the older generation’s fault. its really all of our faults, we’re letting it happen. I’m with you in that we need to be given the
  ball and let us run with it, but to tell you the truth the keys to the gym wouldnt be bad either….

  Posted by carlosinhp on Nov 30, 2009 at 8:07 PM

  “I observe your lives. You are smart and can do things via computer I can only dream of. But few of you read a newspaper or even online news sites. However, you are constantly texting and twittering—opening e-mail seems too dated. You want the news to be as brief and fast as Twitter; you would like classes to move along in some more amusing format like animé. You avoid doing research if it involves books; the text you read is on your cell.

  Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the street. If Martin Luther King, Jr. had blogged “I have a dream” on Facebook, how many would have twittered back, “Yeah, dude, I had a dream last night, too.”

  Life online has turned you away from the world around you. This virtual life is more real to you than planet Earth. As Taylor McHugh, one of my activist students put it, “Students feel apathy, not empathy.”

  I find many of your comments about students’ use of technology dubious.

  1. Online news outlets might very well prove superior in a number of ways to the newspapers you want students to read. Remember when bloggers and internet virility kept alive the story of Trent Lott’s racist comments when mainstream media was letting the issue pass?

  2. It doesn’t follow that because something is short it is necessarily shallow or superficial. The sonnet is short and deep. Twitter can be too. Students are flooded with information, and they are adapting like we are adapting.

  3. Texting has enabled mass resistance and organization e.g.,  Rheingold’s work on Smart Mobs.

  4. Your contention that “life online has turned you away from the world around you” is grounded in a false opposition between life online and life in the “world.” Life online is part of the world.

  5. For a leftist radical, you hold remarkably harmonious views toward new technologies as Mark Bauerlein, who is currently the deadest white male on the planet. That in and of itself is scary.

  Posted by Matt Williams on Dec 2, 2009 at 7:06 PM

  There is no outrage anymore, simply a deep ache for the ever growing weight of the world.

  This is what occurs to me, a college student, as I read this article.  I have mentioned the Coup in Honduras to many of my peers, and all of them had no idea what I was talking about. The fact is that being informed about the world seems to have become some sort of useless and painful experience. (I have been called masochistic for reading the news each morning.)  Multiple intelligent, compassionate people have confessed that they simply can’t read the news everyday, as it makes them too depressed.  Folks with big hearts, with eating disorders, addictions, those who are sexually harassed, overworked, under-loved, who find themselves in a world where all that suffering doesn’t begin to measure up to pain of the world.

  I don’t push the importance of being politically informed on my acquaintances, because I don’t blame them for never being taught how to make that type of knowledge empowering.  Instead we have been taught to turn this knowledge inward, to shop, to drink, to smoke, to cut, to snort, to gag, to steal, and most importantly, to hate ourselves, the failures. 

  You want to know why there isn’t a mass student movement? Because poverty, war, corruption, neoliberalism, capitalism, hunger, prison, torture, slavery,  global warming, and racism has left some of your dutiful students a little overwhelmed. Some may attempt to join an organization: Cal-Pirg, Amnesty International, Socialist Organizer– but even these folks walk around with the crippling knowledge that their involvement is not enough.

  We ALL must look deep into the heart of our culture, and our society, if we do indeed wish to see the disease that is eating away at our integrity.  And then we all may practice together how to change.

  Posted by Claire Williams on Dec 2, 2009 at 7:21 PM

  Claire,

  I completely understand what you mean. the lack of will by organizations (and not necessarily referring to the ones you listed) on the left to acknowledge the role of neoliberalism and the uglyness of what we’re really up against (hint: its more than one particular political party or one particular issue) is truly frustrating.

  I encourage you to come to the next US Social Forum in June. Its a space where 100’s of organizations are starting to collaborate on building that better world from within the U.S. www.ussf2010.org

  the first one in atlanta was amazing (over 13k ppl),and out of it new configurations and networks are emerging that I believe can add up to something greater, but we need to continue building it. I’ve not necessarily given up hope on change maybe coming from current strategies of larger and well funded organizations, but I definitely feel we need to be organizing our politics to scale if we want to present a real challenge that can potentially inspire those who have lost hope.

  keep building….and see you in Detroit?!

  Posted by carlosinhp on Dec 2, 2009 at 7:29 PM

  Check out what’s happening at the University of California right now. Students are protesting, just for a fair-priced education. Most people are willing to go out and protest, they’re just not willing to sacrifice themselves to do it. Sad, perhaps, but true. You’re right when you compare the difference between cost in education now and back in the 60s. You asked where your generation failed ours. There’s your answer: School prices go up and up to the point where it’s become as big of a scam as self help seminars. Ask all those people at California’s state capital how much they paid to go to the University of California. Then ask why they’re not willing to reinvest into the system. (Maybe because they know it created jackasses like them.)

  Posted by kilgoretrout9835 on Dec 7, 2009 at 10:40 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 8 posts.

Also featured INSIDE CUBA: Gay Life in Cuba
INSIDE CUBA: We’re Bad Cuz Nobody Loves Us, Nobody Loves Us Cuz We’re Bad
INSIDE CUBA: A Day in My Life (Any Day)

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!