Driving It Home

“At the time, I would see little girls on the side of the road, and I felt like I was part of a big machine that was going to help them have a better life. At the time.”

“After that, now I think, well, now I’m damned. Now I’ve done the worst thing.”

~Iraq Comes Home, Information Liberation

This year, thousands of Americans missed Thanksgiving with their families, and were not home for Christmas. Many won’t be home ever again. The war in Iraq is, for the foreseeable future, the most controversial topic in the lives of many Generation Y’ers, and the rest of the world, as well. So many of us stand vehemently against what our own country is doing there, and yet there are staggeringly large numbers of our generation fighting as we forget them in our righteous indignation. In truth, it is these members of the Millenial Generation, the ones risking their lives for their country when no one is even sure it’s the right thing, and when more than half the country is against everything they are doing there, that stand as the best examples of the dedication and stubborn determination to make a difference that has begun to characterize the younger generation’s impact on our world. So, finally, my first “real” posting is for the young soldiers in Iraq. I hope fewer people forget you now.

According to a report released from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Personnel, and Readiness, 49% of the troops on active duty in the US enlisted military forces were between the ages of 17-24. Imagine how this number has increased in the past five years as more Gen Y’ers have come of age to enlist and decided to sign up to fight.

According to the Brookings Institution Iraq Index released on October 29, 2007, the total troops having gone to Iraq are more than 28,000. 3,839 of those, as of the end of October, will never come home. 2,967 of those were between the ages of 17 and 30 when they were killed. That is 77% of the total casualties.

So many of us in Generation Y oppose the war; there are so many opportunities for us right now here in America to do exciting things and make a difference. What motivates those who sign up to fight a war that has no end in sight and such a scary chance of injury or death? I asked myself this question when my younger stepbrother decided to forego college and signed up for the Marines right after high school graduation. He comes from a military family, so it was not a surprise, but I tried my best to convince him that college was a better choice, and then afterwards he could enter the military as an officer. I couldn’t understand when he never wavered in his decision.

When I attended his graduation from boot camp down in South Carolina, I began to understand a little better what was driving him. The sense of purpose in everything those young men did was palpable. Even marching down the street and standing in formation took on special significance because of the reasons they were going through it. It showed me a different meaning of the word “duty,” one that does not focus on the personal connection, as I had always understood it and mentioned in my last post, but “duty” as in doing your part, being a part of something larger. For many of those Marines, it’s not necessarily about fighting terror- it’s tough for anyone to understand how what is happening in Iraq is really making a difference against terrorism. But for a 20-year-old Marine, perhaps it’s more about fighting to make a difference, to protect Americans’ right to make a difference, even if that means disagreeing with the very thing that the Marine is giving his life for. When this country is perfect, no one will have to die in the midst of a power struggle masked as a philosophically and morally justified destruction of a society such as this one. Until then:

“People would pop shots at us and pop back. They'd have a setup where they have a bomb in the road, and everybody sits by the windows when they set off an IED. When we're looking at what's going on, everybody's laughing and pointing and smiling after your buddy's sitting there bleeding.”

“I have PTSD. I know when I got it -- the night I killed an 8-year-old girl. Her family was trying to cross a checkpoint. We'd just shot three guys who'd tried to run a checkpoint. And during that mess, they were just trying to get through to get away from it all. And we ended up shooting all them, too. It was a family of six. The only one that survived was a 13-month-old and her mother. And the worst part about it all was that where I shot my bullets, when I went to see what I'd shot at, there was an 8-year-old girl there. I tried my best to bring her back to life, but there was no use.”

~Iraq Comes Home, Information Liberation

There is no way we can feel good about this. If you disagree with the war, nothing will ever redeem it in your eyes, especially after hearing stories like these. It’s a war- it’s unlike any other cause. It’s ugly and destructive and sad and confusing. But be careful not to simply label it “war” as if that does justice to the nameless, faceless mass of gun-wielding fatigues that is so often our only vision of a vastly different reality. When those faces begin to fill in, as they did for me when my stepbrother became one of them, “war” no longer seems a satisfactory way to describe a maelstrom of physical, emotional, ideological, domestic, and international conflicts. “War” is suddenly too simple, and we’re left with tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, trying to describe what we don’t understand. And all we can see really clearly, if we keep our eyes and minds open and if we’re lucky, is that these tens of thousands of young people believe in something so much that they are willing to give their lives for it. Whether we agree with the war itself or not, we must recognize these soldiers, these young adults, as an example of this generation’s maturity, depth of emotion, and sheer courage. Let’s hope that most of these amazing men and women come back to lead Generation Y as we gradually take over here at home.

"Our Heroes Next Door"- official VFW video

Mission Statement

Boy has this blogging thing caught on. You can’t read a news article these days without a quote from someone’s blog, as so many experts jump on the bandwagon and take on this new pastime as the mistress to the careers they are married to during the day. And many of these verbose typing maniacs are members of the infamous “Generation Y,” the terror of the current business and nonprofit worlds- the subject of so much controversy, and so many blogs, that an entire slang language has been born just to discuss this shadowy mass of teens and twenty-somethings. Generation Y, alternately called Generation Me, the Millennial Generation, Generation Q, Generation IPOD, the Internet Generation…I know of no official name, no label that adequately describes the group, except one. My generation.
We are often defined as those born around the late 70’s through the early years of the next century, although again, the label is fuzzy. There are around 70 million of us in America alone. We are the most diverse generation of Americans yet, with one out of three of us being a person of color. We are most often distinguished from our predecessors of Generation X and the Baby Boomers by our comfort with, and often dependence on, the many technological advances that have become a reality during the early years of our tenure. Between laptops that continually get smaller and cheaper, Bluetooth, voice recognition, and cell phones that play music, check email, instant message, and tell us where our friends are at any given second, a public sentiment I have heard increasingly from parents, teachers, and others of the older generations is that this technologically saturated lifestyle has bred the “Millennials” into young adults who don’t know how to relate to people face to face, and who depend on technology to accomplish things they should be able to do themselves. Even Thomas Friedman, in his article to light a fire under the butts of the “Quiet Americans,” points out that “Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the worlds by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms.” But who knows what COULD have been accomplished by Dr. King and other revolutionaries if they had had tools like Facebook, if they could have reached millions of people each day with a few clicks of their mouse? The older generations’ obsession with our tech savvy simply highlights their own lack of comfort with all of the incredible developments their own hard work has created for us all. And while they flounder around, stuck in their mid-to-late twentieth century rut, why would they blame us Y’ers for taking the opportunity to stretch the muscles of all of these new advancements? As the only generation of adults to be born in the 20th century that will live the large majority of our lives in the 21st, we are in a unique position to bridge the gap between past, present and future. Who knows what could be done with all of the new technology and knowledge we have gained in the past few decades- who knows how far we can take it? In fact, who knows how far it’s already being taken, by Generation IPOD, every day?
A discussion on NPR’s Forum addressed the issue of Generation Y by presenting the results of an MTV survey about our views of happiness, and then listening to a college professor label our confidence as narcissism. Our fault, she said, is putting ourselves before duty, volunteering because we want to be volunteers instead of feeling compelled. Why is it wrong to put what we care about before what the rest of the world thinks we should care about? The concept of duty is meaningless if there is no personal context. Millennials are a generation of perpetually optimistic and oddly idealistic citizens. We believe we can do anything if we try hard enough, because we believe we are entitled to succeed. This is the fatal mistake that poor college professor has made. We are not narcissistic- we just believe we deserve the world, and we deserve it the best it can be. We feel entitled to have enough food, a good place to live, warm clothes, and an education. And we feel that everyone else is entitled to these things, as well. More directly relevant, we feel entitled to be happy with our jobs. Unlike any generation before us, we feel entitled to fulfillment, and it is that expectation that has Generation IPOD hip-hopping our way into leadership positions in the world of nonprofit and philanthropy far more quickly than those before us.
Just as technology is progressing at an ever-increasing pace, so is the potential of the Millennial Generation- to create things once believed to be pure science fiction, to break down walls once thought impenetrable, and to solve problems that even now seem hopeless. Not only do we have more and greater technologies and opportunities than any generation before us, but we are using them in completely new ways- which is what has those Boomers and X’ers backing away nervously and muttering about the loss of social consciousness. But if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, why would Generation Y follow in the shaky footsteps of all that the past generations have failed to work out? While older generations spend their time trying to kindle our sense of civic duty, Gen Y’ers are establishing organizations to solve world hunger, rebuilding New Orleans with our bare hands, we are already looking to the future and educating those younger and less fortunate than us. And we are fighting an endless war, graduating from college, leading protests, and making the world smaller every day.
I say this to my fellow members of Generation Y: don’t be fooled when you hear about our selfishness and our narcissism, because all around us are people our age making things happen in new ways, and in their own ways.
I say this to Baby Boomers, Gen X’ers, and others who stand in bewildered fear: Some calming breaths may help, and enable you to jump on the bandwagon so that before you are gone and we take over, our earth will be greener, our people healthier, and our countries more peaceful.
And to us all: There’s so much that’s already being done by this controversial generation of rising stars to fix both the problems that we ourselves are causing, and those that we’ve only inherited. Let’s take a look around.