Last week, I spent over an hour in a disheartening conversation with a student. She said she had spent her Spring Break watching TikTok videos of the humanitarian crises in Gaza and Ukraine. Despite her family’s efforts to cheer her up, she told me she felt helpless to do anything. She had donated money to relief efforts but felt it wasn’t nearly enough.
The best I can do in these discussions is to offer anodynes. As with the student’s contributions they aren’t nearly enough. What strikes me is that these kind of conversations with students have become more common. It’s true that subjective life experience for young people has become seemingly grim of late. Casual exchanges with students suggest the pandemic may have been a tipping point. Parents are more sheltering than those of my youth. The pandemic was probably the first indication to today’s kids that the outside world can be a scary place.
Throw in the shenanigans of the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, and it’s understandable that young people are more anxious than in the past. The uncertainty surrounding what may happen in November and beyond isn’t helping. The first week of classes, I had three students ask me if I thought there would be a civil war. Notwithstanding the polarization of the last eight years, I’d never gotten a question like that.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The media have posed that question with growing frequency for months. I have private doubts about the stability of our social and political systems but don’t express them in class or in personal conversations. It’s hard to be reassuring, though. A couple of months ago, I was a panelist in a discussion concerning past polarization in America. My part was to cover the runup to the Civil War (the first one). While the theme was to point out that we have been polarized at various times, a recap of the 1850s and its mounting evils—Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown’s raid—personally reinforced my sense that we are once more on the precipice.
If I’m unsettled by what’s going on, I can only imagine what my young students are feeling. Now that I’m mostly back in the live classroom it’s hard to distance myself or feel detachment from what the students are experiencing. During the lockdowns my online students were a mix of traditional and “mature” students, with the inevitable subpopulation of MAGA trolls. The trolls are mostly in the past, since the internet affords anonymity and a classroom does not.
But of course we are all online, the old and the young. Ridiculous conjectures like Pizzagate and QAnon are fading into the past, along with the eructs of Alex Jones. But rest assured something just as bad, if not worse, will take their place. And while the youngsters have migrated to Instagram and TikTok, Facebook and Truth Social are still the refuge of the delusional and unhinged. What’s been simmering the last four years threatens to boil over as we get closer to Election Day. And I suspect that underlies the anxiety some of my students are experiencing.
For better or worse, I guess we are in this together.
©
2024 The Unassuming Scholar
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