Recently, while sitting at a café with a friend, the server
made a derisive remark on what he was ordering.
“Usually people don’t tease you when they’re
waiting for a tip,” my friend, mildly peevish,
declared. The vivacious server had just teased him a bit
about ordering what she thought was his third beer. She
looked about the age and had the mannerisms, the poised confidence,
of many of my students. I told my friend I didn’t think
she meant to be impertinent, but just in a matter of fact manner
had accepted that the situation was casual enough to tease a
customer occasionally. But would this have been true decades
ago?
Our society is loosening up. This idea causes older people
to worry: “The proliferation of pornography and
violence in rap music,” “stuff they show on
HBO”… oldsters bemoan a deteriorating society ad
nauseam. Faculty members at the institution where I teach,
myself included on a bad day, are primary offenders:
“They have no respect.” “My students
don’t turn in their work on time and they don’t
care.” “What’s happening to our
students?” Something exciting is happening,
that’s what. Boomers are getting older and don’t
want to let go of the reins. The wild horses are running fast
enough that they’re pulling free anyway. The generation
that was born when punk rock was in full bloom, the generation that
takes for granted the wealth and power of Oprah Winfrey, and gets
bored when you talk about the sixties, that generation is
developing its own moral code, its own signature, its own
confidence. It doesn’t care about anybody else’s
opinion and doesn’t care about following your rules. It
respects you less when you stick to the straight and narrow.
It’s a quiet anarchy—not an oxymoron, because this
anarchy is insidiously working its way through the reaches of
academe, the business world and little cafés everywhere.
This is not a “Black thing,” although Civil Rights
have partially made this new moral code all possible. The new
inclusionary society embraces everyone. The Vietnamese owner
of a small salon where I have my nails done proudly wears a Movado
watch and drives a BMW. Hurray for capitalism! The
elimination of social class via ethnic groups is finally bleeding
into economic fruition, and it’s a joyful sight to see.
“Our [African American] students are better dressed than we
are.” What a scandal! How dare they!!!
Ebonics are also sitting front and center. No one is ashamed
of speaking in any manner. This can be a problem occasionally
as an English professor.
Working in education can be less than glamorous. Face
it--students don’t want to see themselves doing what we do
when they’re our age. Recently I had the fascinating
experience of taking over as the adviser of the student newspaper
on our campus. It was a learning experience for
everyone. I thought I was going to help them so much; I was
going to show them how a liberal college newspaper could
look/feel. We changed the design, toyed with even changing
the name of the venerable publication. At first, the students
trusted me. It was like a big party. But then things
got ugly.
The staff didn’t have a proofreader, so I
volunteered. Mistake! The line between student
and teacher can never be crossed. Now, in boomer times,
proofreading would not be considered breach of freedom of
speech. Welcome to the in-your-face generation. The
in-your-face generation is proud of its grammatical errors,
proud of any errors, in fact, because they’re their
own. Ownership is what it’s all about.
Materialism? No. Ownership. This is in part due
to the aftereffects of the Civil Rights Movement, and it is partly
understandable.
To make an unpleasant story short, my tenure as adviser endured
for one sad semester. The tension was too much. The
kids were glad to see me go back to teaching and get the hell out
of that newsroom. Two semesters later, an issue appeared with
so many grammatical errors that the English department chairperson
decided to take them off the stands and have the staff fix the
errors before it could be redistributed. Outcries of
censorship led to a “situation.” Now, under the
masthead, in small print, each issue states, “Removal of this
paper, without consent or prior authorization from the staff, is a
violation of the law.” Welcome to the new anarchy.
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