TheAgitator.com
The Kids Are Alright, but They Don’t Know Osama bin Laden
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011Here’s your generation gap story of the day: Yahoo reported earlier this week that 1 in 5 searches for “Osama bin Laden” were made by teenagers. Which makes sense, 9/11 was ten years ago, and today’s teenagers were little kids. I can barely remember world events like the Gulf war. I could tell you even less about the end of the Cold War, aside from the old footage of David Hasselhoff on the Berlin Wall – which I saw on VH1′s I Love the 80s, natch.
Megan McArdle notes that many of the celebrants in DC and New York on Sunday night were college-age kids, and wonders if “for them, hearing that Bin Laden had been killed wasn’t a bit like hearing that we mowed down Satan, or the Grinch–not the death of a specific person, but striking down the personification of evil in the world.”
Perhaps that describes the sentiment in New York, a city known for its pride, whose self-regard is so high it can annoy midwesterners like myself (not that that pride isn’t justified. My home state’s claims to fame are the Mall of America and being home to Prince, with no national tragedies to speak of). But in a transient city like DC, which lacks the kind of shared identity New Yorkers exhibit, it’s likely that a lot of these college-age partiers weren’t even here during 9/11.
People, and young people especially, like to be where the party is, to feel like they’re a part of something, even if an event’s significance is beyond their comprehension. It makes me think of an unpopular kid in high school who unexpectedly dies, then overnight becomes the most popular kid in the school’s history (apologies if that analogy feels crass). That’s my pessimistic, misanthropic $0.02, anyhow. Were any of you there in front of the White House Sunday night? What was the general mood among the younger people? Generic patriotism? Pride in the US troops? Preoccupied their iPhones, live-tweeting the party, going on record to say “Dude, I was there.”?
You don’t consider the megamall a national tragedy? I avoid that place like the plague. “There’s a place to run for your life, Mall of America!”
In all seriousness, our national tragedy is the Vikings.
Also of note was a story on how few kids (under 25) in China knew of “Tank Man”. In fact, some of their parents who had been in T-Square and they still didn’t know anything about it. US kids of the same age knew more.
Regarding OBL: Most of the college crowd was 9-11 years old in 2001. Having a kid of each age today I can understand why their knowledge is shaky.
So, kids…pfft.
I’m no teenager, I remember when mankind first walked on the moon. I was listening to an amateur radio repeater of Mission Control when the Challenger exploded. I certainly saw all the footage of planes and buildings on Sept. 11.
The first thing I did when I heard about Bin Laden was google it to verify the reports. So it makes perfect sense that the hits would go through the roof.
Bob – from the articles about this that I read the under 25 crowd weren’t just googling OBL they were asking the google oracle who he was because they had no effing clue. I saw screengrabs of tweets from these twits and they were amusing – “Who is Osama Bin Laden and why should I care about his death?” “Srsly, why is this Osama guy’s death in big news? I never hrd of him”
OK, a word on the Yikings. I propose that no sport fan has suffered more than Viking fans. A couple generations sat in the coldest of cold at the old Met…no championships. 4 Super Bowls…all loses. About a dozen NFC championship games…lost. Sid Hartman. More Hall of Famers than any team without a championship (IIRC).
Lions? No. Never coming close is not suffering.
Eagles? Please. You’re in the conversation, but still not close. Having every team in your division winning a Super Bowl except you does get you sympathy.
Baseball doesn’t matter (no salary cap) and no one cares about the NBA.
People, and young people especially, like to be where the party is, to feel like they’re a part of something, even an event’s significance is beyond their comprehension.
Am I the only one whose thoughts went straight to Girls Gone Wild?
Not just Prince, also Dylan and Craig Finn.
Excuse me Boyd Durkin, but if you aren’t from Cleveland, you can take your wimpy sports “suffering” and throw it in one of your thousands of lakes.
Cleveland? Same category as Detroit. You have to at least get sniffing close to championships to qualify.
Thank you for acknowledging the pain of Eagles fans, Boyd, but I’d argue we’re closer than you admit (I’m biased, but I think we have it worse than Vikings fans). 51 years since the last title, which was before I was born. In the last decade. Despite a plethora of NFC Championship Game appearances, only 2 Super Bowl appearances. And the other 3 teams in the division have won multiple Super Bowls, which means that despite recent dominance of the division (and despite the fact that they’ve either been terrible in recent times (Redskins) or have won one playoff game in 15 years (Cowboys), their fans still can point to their teams’ rings.
Yet every year I come back and know that THIS YEAR, dangit, we’re going to win.
As for OBL, it depresses me. Not the kids’ fault, it depresses me that the quality of schooling in this country is so low.
erm, one sentence above was supposed to read “In the last decade, we’ve come close every year (except one), but manage to screw it up somehow”
Fine, so the Browns have never been to the Super Bowl, but they suck so bad it is just disheartening even out of sniffing distance.
Indians= Haven’t won a championship since 1948. Division title 1995, 1996. World Series, 1997. ALCS, 1998. Division series, 1999. Central division title, 2007. Is that close enough to smell?
Cavaliers= I can tell you that it was definitely close enough to smell, and it smelled terrible. As did The Decision.
So…. what percentage of internet searches overall do you suppose are performed by teens? That’d be a handy bit of info to have before forming an opinion as to the underlying meaning of the statistic….
When I reflect on the ignorance among adults I encounter, it is painful to think of the children. I think I recall people asking similar questions on and immediately after September 11, 2001 (as if bin Laden had not been well known for orchestrating terrorist attacks for years).
The only sports sympathy I have is for Cleveland fans, however if the Tribe continues to play the way they are currently this could be there year. Minnesota would be second because the Vikings can never climb over that last hump and the Twins always get stuck facing the Yankees in the playoffs.
Eagels fans have at least the Phillies to be proud of.
For me the Mets are always being compared to the Yankees and are currently the sports media’s whipping boy right now. The Jets are still playing second fiddle to the Giants (at least until they win another Super Bowl) and the future of the Devils is unknown with a new coach coming in next season.
C’mon Morgan, the “Indians” aren’t real! That’s just a movie with Charlie Sheen pitching.
If you aggregate losing across all sports, Cleveland does in fact “win” easily and I admit that. The Twinkies won twice in dramatic fashion and that puts the Twin Cities out of contention. But Vikings beat any individual franchise for suffering. My argument against NBA and MLB still stands. Plus, the Viking mascot has a mullet. Missing Rings!
I begin telling my kids about OBL by first explaining US foreign policy.
First, what Cyto said. Second, there’s that whole thing where you know who Osama Bin Laden is, AND you google his name.
To clarify the point that kids don’t know who OBL is (I should have pulled this quote from the article):
From the article linked in the first sentence of the blog post: “However, it seems teens ages 13-17 were seeking more information as they made up 66% of searches for ‘who is osama bin laden?’”
I think this piece reflected my perspective pretty well. http://techpresident.com/short-post/calling-bull-teenagers-dont-know-who-osama-bin-laden-search-stories
Money quote:
“We could just as easily reading the data as “Teenagers Eagerly Search Out Information on Current World Events, and Good for Them.”"
It’s very possible that teenagers are really that sheltered and/or insular, but the whole press release gave off a “kids these days suck” vibe. It irritated me when I was a teenager, and it irritates me today as a parent – mainly because it’s pretty well established that every generation of teenagers since the beginning of time has been considered worse than the generations before – and they aren’t. They just have a different world to grow up in and they adjust to that world, which makes adults feel uncomfortable. Then they’ll do the same to the next generation.
I’m gonna have to disagree with the premise of the following: “But in a transient city like DC, which lacks the kind of shared identity New Yorkers exhibit, it’s likely that a lot of these college-age partiers weren’t even here during 9/11.”
To posit NY as the antithesis of a transient city is just plain wrong-headed. There are long-time New Yorkers, just as there are long-term Washingtonians, but both cities are exemplars of transience. Indeed, Frank Sinatra’s eponymous anthem to New York is quintessentially about its appeal to the ambitious and footloose:
Start spreading the news, I’m leaving to day
I’m gonna be a part of it, New York New York
These vagabond shoes are long to stray
right through the very heart of it, New York, New York
I wanna wake up in a city that never sleeps
and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap
These little town blues are melting away,
I’ll make a brand new start of it, in old New York
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
It’s up to you, New York, New York
Fer chrissakes, just what do you think that big copper lady in the middle of the harbor symbolizes? And that island next to it where millions of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free entered America?
What people simultaneously love and hate most about New York is that strangers from everywhere come together and become an ever-changing movable cultural feast. Scoop up the people at a single intersection at rush hour, and you will find people with every calling and from a score of nations. Maybe a handful were born in the city, but most are from everywhere. Dubuque and the Dominican. Brooklyn, Boston, Birmingham (AL and UK), Belfast, Bologna, and Burkina Faso.
If there is a more cosmopolitan, dynamic, ever-changing place in the world, please tell me because I would like to visit.
Could you possibly have chosen a worse example of a city to contrast with DC’s transience?
I have tried to look at it from the perspective of what what happened in my life 10 years before I was in High school and college (i am almost 37).
When I was between 5 and 7 years old, Lennon was shot, Reagan was shot, the Iran hostage crisis, and Russia invaded Afghanistan. So if I heard when I was 16 that Mark Chapman or the Ayatollah Khomeini was killed, I probably would not have known who they were.
But whn I was between 9 and 11, Challenger blew up, Iran/Contra, The Night Stalker, Gorbachev becomes Russia leader and meets with Reagan. I remember all these events clearly. So if you were to tell me that Richard Ramirez or Gorbachev were killed, I would have known who they were.
Leah – haha, that’s a fantastic quote. Or how about “Breaking: Kids are curious.” “Seven-year-olds don’t watch world news.”
Varmintito: NYC draws a lot of people and is an historic hub for immigrants, but (I think) there’s a rich enough culture and economy there that many people decide to stay. It seems to me – as an outsider, admittedly – that most of the folks I know who’ve set out for NYC haven’t come back. In fact, a lot of people head that way after doing the DC thing. We’re like your “starter city.” I could be totally wrong, but a quick Wiki consultation says the city’s ppln has been growing since the 1980s. (DC’s grew faster in the last decade, though).
DC gets a fair share of people just passing through, “delaying their lives” for a few months or years between undergrad and grad/law school, surviving on low-paying journalism, research, nonprofit jobs – or Hill internships. In fact, the white collar economy seems to be built around having a steady labor supply of cheap recent graduates. (My characterization of course ignores the (largely black) native population of DC, because I’m a SWPLish gentrifier who rarely leaves the NW quadrant and lives between a local farmer’s market and a Starbucks. ). ;)
/end wild internet speculation.
I view the reaction to the death of OBL in a similiar way to the reaction to the election of Obama. The media portrays it as some sort of transcendant moment that signals big change, but it is largely meaningless.
[...] also recall in my recent memory how several of you college kids claimed the OBL assassination as an excuse to have a Sunday night victory party, despite being mere baby egg-brains when 9/11 occurred. It was a patriotic time for the country of [...]