Generation Why
Nussbaum, Anna
GENERATION WHY Anna Nussbaum On Valentine's Day, six University of Notre Dame students piled into a minivan and drove east through the night toward New York City to join the protests against the...
...tried to sleep...
...We sang along with Dave Math-ews in four-four time-"A million reasons life to deny let's toss them away"- ate junk food and argued about politics...
...None of us had all the answers...
...Before my unremarkable generation are the same questions of right and wrong that have faced every generation...
...talked about faith, doubt...
...so they registered for a Bible study before they left-just in case something happened...
...Now I know a Notre Dame student in the reserves...
...tried to see the road, read aloud, got lost, got found, and finally pulled into the city...
...Others talked about just-war theory...
...That was then...
...Now we have the war we almost wished for...
...Some days we wanted to move to the mountains with sweet boyfriends in tow and just hide out...
...We could ride in the armored cars, sometimes even drive them, and drink free Pepsi products while talking to real Marines about our future...
...But the experts were right: we lacked substance...
...Would I have died for them...
...We set out for New York each for our own reasons...
...With our signs and slogans we followed the crowds streaming across town to the United Nations building...
...We prayed together as we began the journey...
...They were scared...
...The Marines took two boys at the end of first semester...
...We drove fast for fourteen hours, taking turns behind the wheel and navigating, ignoring the irony of driving in a gas-powered vehicle so we could protest what our buttons called a war for oil...
...We must have been quite a sight: a silver minivan full of college kids from the Midwest in a sea of yellow cabs, pulling over to ask a man for directions to Times Square...
...We've never seen a war...
...Under what circumstances...
...We ask ourselves every day where we stand and then try to live there...
...told our life stories...
...How would they fare in this too-easy world...
...The military recruiters called my house almost every week of my senior year in high school...
...Then we drove and drove, barreling along the freeway...
...And I know a Notre Dame Air Force ROTC student who is also in Pax Christi...
...One student quoted Dorothy Day, "No one has the right to sit down and feel helpless...
...I have heard my generation called many names, none too flattering...
...People were going to die...
...Would I have hidden Jews in my house...
...I couldn't be sure, and I was afraid...
...Our generation hasn't had any major struggles except drugs and divorce...
...GENERATION WHY Anna Nussbaum On Valentine's Day, six University of Notre Dame students piled into a minivan and drove east through the night toward New York City to join the protests against the war in Iraq...
...tried to stay awake...
...Would I have killed for them...
...I remember liking how Generation Y sounded like Generation Why, as in "Why bother...
...I thought about the Holocaust stories my mother used to read to me when I was growing up...
...it played on TV like the little lights flashing in a video game...
...Now we would have to respond to the challenge somehow, just as the generations before us did...
...We finally parked the van in a garage and many dollars later joined the shivering multitudes...
...Many good,, mostly poor, boys signed up...
...He is awaiting orders, possibly to leave school...
...In high school, we used to skip class to sit around talking about how we should have been born in the 1960s...
...pulled over for bathroom breaks...
...In middle school they started calling us Generation Y, I guess because it followed X in the alphabet...
...We set out to answer the question of evil, to respond to it, to educate ourselves, to look seriously at what might be done in our names...
...Still, we had not known violence like this, so dose to home...
...We've been called Generation Y2K, and even Generation O, which stands for obese...
...I remembered how I'd lie awake at night and wonder what I would have done if I had lived then...
...They came to my school and parked shiny Hummers equipped with fancy sound systems on the lawn...
...They left and we stayed...
...He's been activated...
...We prayed for our peace and our safety, and for the peace and safety of people we would never know...
...Before September 11, 2001, we knew something of violence: a gun at a party, a fight at school, a drunken neighbor yelling at his wife...
...In our own way, even then, we worried about our souls...
...Would you kill another human being...
...The experts anticipated we'd be spoiled techno-savvy spenders...
...There is too much work to do...
...We suck," my fourteen-year-old friends and I used to say...
...Encouraged to sign up with a "buddy," they went to boot camp and then to Afghanistan...
...Would you die for someone...
...I was one of them...
...When we were in grade school there was even a war in the Middle East...
...We were all worried about a future we feared we could not change, but knew we had no right to do nothing...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 7
