There was a meme that went around social media last year — maybe you saw it in your Facebook feed.
“Born into the world during 9/11,†it went. “Now graduating into a pandemic.â€
The graphic was intended as a salute to those of us who graduated high school last year, in the class of 2020. But as I suppose kids often do with the memes their parents share on Facebook, I distinctly remember laughing at it with my friends. The image, and others like it, applauded us as though we were uniquely worthy of praise and extraordinarily resilient. Never mind that we felt pretty ordinary: Those were just the events that had happened to fall during our lifespans, we shrugged. All we had done was live through them.
Some of the posts were even accompanied by graphics of the Twin Towers. But how, we asked, could we be applauded as resilient for surviving an event we don’t remember or that some of us (myself included) were not even alive for?
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But with the 20th anniversary of 9/11 (and, thus, my own 20th birthday) approaching, and a year of COVID college behind me, I’ve begun to wonder if the Facebook posts we scoffed at may have had some merit.
After all, the political scientists and statisticians Yair Ghitza, Andrew Gelman, and Jonathan Auerbach have , and the journalist Charlotte Alter has , that what happens during voters’ early adulthood shapes their political consciousness for their entire lives. The events during your growing-up, they’ve found, form your ideology in powerful ways and pretty much never let go as you continue to take part in politics for the rest of your adult life.
Put in those terms, it’s worth considering the events that have taken place as my generation has grown up. Born as the nation was wrestling with the aftermath of the worst terror attack in American history, watching our parents grow more fearful of the world around us. Entering our college years during the worst pandemic in American history, as we were once again conditioned to fear one another, this time because of a viral pathogen.
And in between those bookends: two global recessions. Worsening climate change that looms over our future. A spate of school massacres that have normalized active shooter drills in our classrooms. Rising economic and racial inequality. And all of it playing out on social media for us all to see, waiting for us each time we pull down on our screens to click “refresh.â€
Suddenly — even if we ourselves haven’t realized it — the fairly gloomy ideology embraced by my generation begins to make sense. According to a , 81% of Generation Z believe the United States is on the wrong track, while just 39% say they trust the U.S. government. On both ends of the political spectrum, Gen Z discourse is punctuated by calls for radical changes to “the system†— whether it be police and Wall Street or Big Tech and “the swamp.â€
It should not be surprising considering how many times “the system†has let us down in 20 short years, from failing to anticipate a terror attack to doing the same for a global pandemic. Even now, the government is struggling to end a war sprung from that attack, after struggling to fight it for nearly our entire lives.
A poll by recently found that a majority of today’s teens believe America’s best years are behind us, an unmistakable shift from our generational predecessors, the millennials, who responded as teens that the country’s best years were still to come.
To be born into 9/11 and graduate into a pandemic has been to witness the pace of history quicken, to live through world-altering events — one after another — on an almost constant and inescapable basis. And then, to outwardly shrug at them, because they have formed the only normal we’ve ever known, numb to the fact that they have collectively disillusioned us in ways that we will almost surely carry into our adulthood.
Everyone in my generation has heard our parents’ 9/11 stories. In my case, it was hearing the fear that came with them being in New York City on September 11, my mom seven months pregnant. Those 9/11 stories illuminate the first in a series of seismic events that have marked our upbringing and forged our political identities. From a terrorist attack and a pandemic, to school shootings and mass protests, each of these events has injected new uncertainty into our lives and brought with them fresh reasons to grow more fearful and less trustful. Looking to the uncertainty of the future, threats such as climate change only add to the sense of dread that is endemic to my cohorts.
We didn’t ask for these uncertainties: In many ways, they were handed down to us from a world that was frozen in terror from the very moment we were born. What we do with the uncertainty, with those pent-up passions and emotions — that remains to be seen.
Gabe Fleisher is a ºüÀêÊÓƵ native, student at Georgetown University, and author of Wake Up to Politics.
Gabe Fleisher is a ºüÀêÊÓƵ native, student at Georgetown University and author of Wake Up to Politics.Â