We Youth Are Sooooo Apathetic <i> (Yawn)</i> : Poll Discovers the Obvious, but Is It Possible the Condition Is Serious This Time?

A new Times Mirror opinion poll has found that Americans aged 18-30 pay less attention to world events than their elders. Citizens in this age group are least likely to vote or to criticize public officials and are largely uninterested in participating in public affairs.

Does this really come as any surprise?

At first glance, “The Age of Indifference” paints the Baby Doomers, the 18-30-year-olds, as an apathetic generation that disdains the burdens of citizenship. But indifference is too loaded a word to describe the ennui expressed to pollsters by the young adults. Rather they are demonstrating that they lack a sense of history and a vision for the future that would put their lives in perspective.

The youth tell pollsters again and again that they feel they missed recent history’s most important moments. They were born to parents stripped of their Kennedy-era optimism by Watergate and the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. was before their time. They are skeptical that progress is possible, that their efforts count. The Doomers are ambivalent about perestroika, but not because they are unconcerned with global security: They zapped the TV news with the remote control months ago, aghast such obvious changes took so long to effect.

Perhaps the biggest change for Doomers is the erosion of their financial prospects. Many leave college in a kind of modern-day indentured servitude, tens of thousands of dollars in debt for an education that no longer guarantees stable employment.

It’s not that members of this generation don’t care. Many do. But they see themselves as impotent to change things and scared to try because of the chance of failure. What these Doomers need is an introduction to the idealism that fueled the generations before them. The happiest members of this singular generation find fulfillment in endeavors that yield tangible results. The 261 Peace Corps volunteers just evacuated from the Philippines bear witness to this. Others are enthusiastic about Teach America, a corps-like program in which aspiring young teachers venture into understaffed rural and inner city public schools. There is a place for them; they are needed.

The Doomers are guilty mostly of self-defeatism, a dangerous albeit understandable state. In a democracy, the notion that one is powerless to take control of one’s destiny can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Doomers will have to overcome this paralysis if they are to prepare to lead our future society.