The 600 Faces of Eve

How I became a 100-year-old, motorcycle riding, white evangelical hip-hop member of a steel drum band begins with my consideration of why today's generation of young people are not a visible political presence when the entire civil rights movement is going quietly to its grave.

I have spent a lot of time hoping, waiting for a new wave of the civil rights movement to take hold, a movement embodying the civic energy of the 1960s as reinvigorated by the youth of today. I wonder why there is such apathy.

My students are, on the whole, less anxious about this than I am. They tell me that activism hasn't disappeared--it's just all happening in cyberspace. The Internet is their commons. I am glad to hear it, and when I think about MoveOn.org, it seems reasonable that there might be real movement by real bodies. At the same time, as anyone in academia knows, those of college age and below are online all the time. Even in class, the laptops are burning up--they're taking notes ostensibly, checking cites and sources not sites and solitaire, the busy little bees. Yet however genuinely engaged in their classes they may be, it is also true that often we teachers can't see their lips moving anymore, just the tips of their noses over the raised tops of their laptop screens. They speak, they interact, but always a part of their heads, a slab of their faces, an ear or an eye, is sucked into those powerful machines. You can see them receding--heads, necks, arms, torsos disappearing into the fog. Sometimes I just want to pull them out by their feet and manacle them to their chairs.

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