On the magical day that the George Floyd rallies have gathered across the nation, I am watching a local evening news with my family. In the dim glow of our television, my mom and dad glance dizzily at the replaying videos of civilians walking down siren-filled avenues and highways; the rallies began five hours ago and, in the chaos of clean laundry, grocery shopping and work phone calls, they were unaware of the marches until now. In those same five hours since the rallies were gaining media attention, my generation was sending money to first-aid stations, downloading books on abolishing police, and some were even attending the rallies themselves. These chronological pauses between generations can be dilated, broadened. I remember asking my mom and dad if we could avoid paying for Chick-fil-A a whole year before their homophobic finances were a news sensation, and I regularly warn them of local wildfires a few days before black smoke ever blows into our area. One could argue that such a massive lacuna between our generations suggests we as children circulate information more rapidly than our families (and it does indeed), although that fails to consider the dualism it more glaringly emphasizes, which is how we approach political and non-political change. American kids such as ourselves, despite being alive in the same universe as our families, are examining that universe with more attentive and flexible eyes, so much so that it becomes another universe altogether. A democracy in the U.S.A. can only have as much resilience as the U.S.A. participating in it, and no citizens are more ecstatic to change legislation than young adults. As hormonal, moody, and still too young for alcohol as we are, my generation should finally be liable for the political attitudes that emerge from our families, rather than the inverse.
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No human can automatically leave the womb as a certain political party: all blue-leaning and red-leaning Americans were decisively swayed by someone, somewhere, somehow. And as heavily biased as media corporations are in the U.S., families are logically the nucleus of political information and indoctrination for young adults. I identified as pro-choice, for example, way before I researched what an abortion was, or the perplexing medical and scientific friction surrounding abortion surgeries, and I did so exclusively because my family was fond of pro-choice laws. Sure, I am glad that my mom and dad brainwashed me into evaluating the basic human rights of women, and sure, I may have been pro-choice anyways, but as you can guess, familial brainwashing operates in a similar manner when passing down pro-life ideologies and worse. Oklahoma (OK) has unwaveringly voted for the Republican party in every presidential race since 1964, signaling not that the humans in Oklahoma have conservatism in their veins, merely that a high density of children are growing up in families who seek more relaxed gun ownership laws, more harsh immigration laws or other right-wing policies, and forgivably, in an attempt to earn the approval of their families, they have imitated those political biases on election day.
We can imagine a family in America as a pair of lungs, inhaling political information as oxygen and exhaling sociological opinions as carbon dioxide. Modifying which chemicals go into these lungs will never modify which substances are released back into the world. Our democracy in America has gained remarkable stamina over the generations, and a conservative family watching CNN, either for seven seconds or seven weeks, will remain conservative. An organ cannot spontaneously reverse its chemical reactions unless we reverse, or re-educate, its sinew. In a similar sense, America will only expand its political views if young adults anatomically change how our families respond to active laws and advocate for new ones.
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Yes, young adults are nightmare-inducingly obsessed with social media, and no, that would usually not reveal our political behavior. Our scrolling, and the lack of it in generations above us, has allowed us to choose which songs or movies diffuse through the age hierarchies in America, and which are only diffused among young adults, receiving less revenue. In such a fashion, we are a selectively permeable membrane between a foolish vogue among children and a widely-embraced ideology among grown-ups. And Americans have been relatively satisfied with this sequence of information, perhaps because, until now, the charming information we draw from social media is vacuous in addressing the more urgent issues damaging our civilization, such as racism or economic disparities. Over summer and continuing now in the school year, however, young adults have proven that social media can be an atmosphere for both harmless fashion suggestions and genuine, long-lasting political liberation. Where we once rushed for information if an actress and her boyfriend broke up, we now rush for information on which U.S. laws should be amended, who can amend them, and how our friends can be involved. American politics, previously a dialect we waited until our eighteenth birthdays to speak, is suddenly a social media hurricane we can no longer distance ourselves from. Although my generation is, as of now, the only one catalyzing these drastic societal revisions, I believe our American legislation and each human voting for it can also be accelerated by this blooming in political education. Young adults are discovering the solutions to state-sanctioned discrimination more cosmically and comprehensively than our families, and it would be naive to assume that this activism is only another fleeting phase.
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In Sapiens, an award-winning book that examines human biological and neurological evolution, Noah Yuval Harari hypothesizes that gossiping is why our species, rather than other animals, has unified in the complex social and political webs of our contemporary world. Or, phrased differently, our fixation with sharing scandalous news with each other has informed us who we can and cannot rely on, and because of those relationships, humans have slowly gathered in civilizations that consolidate enough resources to land on the moon or engage in colonialism. Gossiping still certainly remains our favorite flow of information in our American democracy, allowing us to research, through social circles, which political candidates approve of the same legislation that we do. Only now, these rumors are re-locating less through human mouths and more through satellites and wires. Any and all political information we consume in the U.S.A., either on social media, radios, or in classrooms (such as who passed a law worsening mass incarceration, or who made a xenophobic remark, or whose fracking laws would make carbon emissions soar), can warn us very quickly which politicians are violating human rights in our nation. Those of us who have a higher vigilance around political gossiping, we can accordingly speculate, will also have a higher apprehension of our political climate, even (or especially) if those Americans are still surviving puberty.
As young adults, spreading rumors is perhaps our most instinctive behavior: we can never refrain from wondering who kissed whom last night at a party, or which of our friends is auditioning for cheerleading. When we advise our families on which candidate they should be voting for in an election, we are indeed gossiping, even if in a less attention-seeking manner. As much as electronic rumors are increasing the velocity of change, children who open family discussions around that information are also increasing the diameter of change, diameter meaning human participation. A democracy is, and always will be, intimately sustained by political gossip, and who can possibly be more drama-drunk than our own generation of young adults?
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Young adults not only deserve the political sway in our families because we are broadcasting political information in a new manner, but because the information itself that we are broadcasting is new, is radical, is renegade. As my generation discovers the abusive legislation that our favorite political candidates (and the families who made those candidates our favorite) have celebrated mandating, we are losing optimism that a democracy operated by grown-ups will ever attain equality. When members of a democracy re-generate the political heritages of their families, they establish an insular and frighteningly static democracy, one in which slavery lasts for 89 years or in which same-sex marriage is illegal for 239 (since 1776). My generation, meanwhile, is scared of neither the diabolical politicians in the U.S.A. nor the families who venerate them, even if those families gave us our DNA.
One reason is psychological: in adolescence, our neurons are astoundingly flexible, and can be magnetized towards certain political or non-political ideologies with hardly any resistance. Although our lack of maturity is inarguably a flaw in decision-making (young adults are infamous for drunk driving, for example), it can also give us a highly elastic attitude around legislative solutions in America. As much as I feverishly believe my generation is saddened by police brutality, it would be heedless to suggest that social dynamics (as in, wanting to be welcomed into a crowd of fellow young adults with a shared passion) was not a variable in our activism this summer. The same neurological impulses that make us wear the nail polish color that our friend does, could simultaneously make us read information on sugar regulations when a friend we admire expresses worry over a national increase in diabetes diagnoses. As children, our brains also release dopamine in higher frequencies than generations above us. The same insensible pleasure-seeking behavior for which we owe our soda and video game obsessions, could give us the vigor to campaign every evening in our neighborhood for a local DA candidate. When young adults reward each other for being involved in politics, they generate an atmosphere in which amplifying our American democracy is seen as a responsibility, not an extracurricular. Our neurological fragility is, in a very odd sense, a muscle, a muscle that U.S. families should be flexing.
A second reason is sociological. As humans who have been alive for fewer years than our families, we are less automatic in assuming that what is normal legislatively should be normal legislatively. My mom and dad, who have coexisted with and depended on private medical insurance for nearly five decades and have luckily never needed a surgery or medicine they could not afford, will be perplexed by the suggestion to establish universal public medical care. Meanwhile, as someone who is not financially attached to private insurance, I can envisage with less hesitance a future when medical care in America is exclusively socialized. Change can not emerge in any nation, including the U.S.A., unless our legislation changes, and these political mutations should be demanded by humans who are, themselves, mutating.
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I fully acknowledge that evacuating old-fashioned legislation is, conclusively, a liberal approach. An American discovering that mood-altering substances should be decriminalized or that DACA should be renewed is an American being attracted to the Democratic party. As happy as an escalation of liberalism would make me and my family, it does not suggest perhaps the most beautiful way in which children can sway our democracy: abolishing the political parties that the generations above us have installed and mandated continuing. A higher volume of legislative information among young adults, and the oscillating brains receiving it, is making us wonder why a democracy so legislatively elaborate would divide its candidates into either red or blue, with no praxis in the middle. To a degree, partisan governments are designed for uninformed citizens, which, frankly, Americans are, and will be as long as grown-ups have dominance over familial politics. My aggressively informed generation, however, grasps that discrimination in America will not be miraculously dissolved by the parties who have been attempting to dissolve them for decades. We may not eliminate these parties on our own, but as the two-party system appears more and more primal to new generations of young adults, and as those generations become voting age, it will eventually wane from our democracy. My generation is regretting the legislative biases that our families once owned, and I believe this sensation of remorse is evidence we are growing: American politics can not move forwards unless it dawns on us that going backwards would be even more poisonous.
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If we have learned anything from this summer, it is that our abusive, unsympathetic political institutions in America cannot be fixed gradually. And if nursing the wounds of systemic oppression demands dynamic law-making, such laws should be chosen by equally dynamic and information-starved humans. Our higher aged generations will pass away soon, but we are liable for making sure that their resistance to political insurgency does not stay alive when they are gone.
I am not promising that this one-eighty in familial politics will make everybody happy. Young adults are reckless, and we are doomed to recommend candidates whose laws are less liberating than advertised, as grown-ups have been doing since human beings began assembling in kingdoms. A democracy revolving around grown-ups is certainly less chaotic, but chaos, as we observed this summer, is innately peace-loving in an America that normalizes legislative abuse so that it can remain calm. As my generation continues to unveil systematic discrimination in the U.S.A. and the legislation that warrants it, we continue to synthesize new, rapidly changing political attitudes, and because of that mutubility (rather than despite it), young adults should be choosing which biased news channel our families watch, which rallies we attend, and which candidates we believe will heal America.
All summer, young adults have been garnering political information on social media until our fingers are swollen. A democratic revolution has arrived, is arriving, and the humans we owe it to are still perplexed by high school algebra. All you have to do is give us an audience.
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