“Soon the Boomers will be gone and we’ll get what we want. We’ll disrupt the status quo and change the political landscape.” So spoke a young activist lamenting Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton. My first response to that was anger. Just because we’re no longer the largest generation in American history doesn’t mean Boomers are nearing extinction.
But my anger was quickly followed by a flinch of recognition.
Listeners of a certain age will recall framing sentences beginning “When the Revolution comes . . .” promising dire consequences for those obstructing youthful crusades. Of course we’d carry all before us – our hearts were pure; our causes just – ignorant opposition would fall to our self-evident rightness. So we enlisted under the banners of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern, we marched for Civil Rights, we protested the Vietnam War, and cheered when Nixon quit. And along the way we learned some things.
We learned Revolution is complicated, not just because it can become a zero-sum competition for ideological purity where one person’s perfection is another’s treason, but because, even when you achieve your aims, the results aren’t what you’d imagined. Today’s solution often became tomorrow’s problem. We learned that change was messy: getting anything done took much longer than anticipated and produced less than we wanted - and even that involved significant compromise. We learned half a loaf was better than none - sometimes so was a third or a fifth.
We learned success was not making things perfect, but better than they had been. We learned the necessity of agreeing to disagree in order to craft working relationships with people we didn’t trust, but whose help we needed – and, along the way, came to understand and respect their point of view, despite our differences. And we learned that elders who’d survived the Depression and managed to win World War II actually knew useful stuff.
I admire the Millenials. Their energy and commitment to service are inspiring and enlivening. More power to them. But important things don’t happen instantly. Changing the status quo requires patience and a willingness to work hard with people you don’t like for only partial success.
And sometimes, disruption is just... disruption.
