GENERATION X : ‘Revolution X’ Calls a Generation to Action

On his wrinkled “things to do” list Jon Cowan keeps tucked inside his wallet, there’s no entry that says, “Organize the hall closet” or “Change the oil.”

Cowan’s goals are a little more ambitious: “Help master a social problem,” “Replace fear with love,” “Work with major political official or hold public office.”

And that might be the easy part.

“It’s my job as an activist to get tens of millions of people in my generation to vote,” said Cowan, 29, co-author of “Revolution X,” a political call to arms for the twentysomething generation.

But Cowan says he is no revolutionary. After graduating from the Brentwood School in 1983 as president of his class, he went off to Dartmouth College to major in English.

“I was politically apathetic, but I was socially conscious,” he said. “I think that’s where most people in this generation are.”

That’s how his father remembers it.

“When he got out of college, he really had no idea what he wanted to do,” said Bob Cowan, president of Search West, a Century City executive recruiting firm.

Jon tried working for an advertising agency, but that didn’t last long. It was boring and unfulfilling, he said. In 1987, he decided to go off to Washington to do something bigger.

“This is going to sound arrogant,” he said with an embarrassed smile, “but I felt like I had something to give back to the country.”

After a few years working in a think tank and as press secretary for former Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), Cowan was planning to go to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Rob Nelson, a friend and political confidant, was headed to Stanford Law School.

But when they took stock of the political campaigns in the summer of 1992, they saw that no candidates had solid positions on the issues that concerned them: the deficit, the environment, the lack of high-paying new jobs. And no one was acting as an “activist social-change agent in our generation,” Cowan said.

“Over a beer, we struck up this conversation about how so many people in our generation felt disenfranchised from politics,” he said.

They decided graduate school could wait. They hammered out a letter to former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas (D.-Mass.), who had appealed to many young voters in his failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. They wanted his help in starting a “post-partisan” political group to campaign for lowering the deficit.

Tsongas agreed to lend a hand. Then they found a second adviser--Warren Rudman, retiring Republican U.S. senator from New Hampshire. The result was Lead . . . or Leave, a nonpartisan political action group consisting of young voters.

The organization’s first idea was to persuade candidates to sign a pledge promising to cut the deficit in half over four years, or resign.

Tsongas warned them no one would sign, but in the end they enlisted about 100 candidates. Their biggest success was in helping generate public debate about the deficit, Cowan said.

The pledge drive landed them in national newspapers and on CNN, MTV, “Good Morning America” and the network news shows. They sparred on “Nightline” with lobbyists for the American Assn. of Retired Persons, which bitterly opposes their call for limiting Social Security payments for high-income senior citizens and eventually replacing the system with private retirement savings.

Their Op-Ed piece in the New York Times lead to a book deal with Penguin for “Revolution X,” which came out this fall. The revolution is coming, Cowan and Nelson warn in the book.

If such problems as street crime, AIDS and violence in the schools continue, young people will be loathe to shoulder the tax burden that will result when baby boomers retire.

They might take to the streets, burn their Social Security cards and refuse to foot the bill, the book warns. The bloated government debt and the relative increase in the number of retirees could spark the biggest crisis since the Depression.

So who are Cowan and Nelson counting on to steer the country away from that abyss? Their generation of “slackers,” a term they scorn.

“This is a generation of people who are out to survive, to get by,” Cowan said. “We didn’t make this mess, but we’re willing to be part of the cleanup. It’s not like we’re whining and saying, ‘Why did you do this to us?’ ” We’re saying, ‘Let’s start fixing it.’ ”

Cowan’s family, friends and even his fifth-grade teacher turned out for a book signing in Santa Monica last month. Barbara Levine, who still teaches at Franklin Elementary School, said she did not peg young Cowan as a budding revolutionary.

“He was a great kid, a terrific student, high energy,” she said.

His father also said he didn’t raise a radical. In fact, his son convinced him of the dangers of the deficit.

“When he (said) you’re mortgaging my future, that put it in perspective, because that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

Despite the title of the book, Cowan agrees the ideas are not revolutionary.

“There’s nothing in “Revolution X” that most people who spend any time in Washington don’t realize is the truth about the situation in our country,” he said.

Now a veteran of countless interviews, Cowan sprinkles his conversations with statements from the book and pithy sound bites.

“We have the passion and the commitment to make this happen,” he says, “but we’ve constantly had to tap the resources and experience of the older generation.”

Despite the popular notion that his generation is made up of apathetic cynics who don’t vote, Cowan said people his age are willing to do their part.