I never expected to find the secret of my generation's political salvation floating inside a clear glass jar of formaldehyde. Yet there it was, pickled and perched on a lectern before some 200 mesmerized Neuroscience 101 students: a corpus callosum that had been surgically removed from the brain of an epileptic patient. A bewildering network of almost 300 million interlacing nerve fibers, the corpus callosum is known for its role in connecting the "left brain" (the hemisphere of analytical, verbal and quantitative calculations) with the "right brain" (the hemisphere of intuitive, nonverbal and imaginative thought processes). As I listened to my professor describe the devastating effects of extracting the corpus callosum--for instance, one exasperated patient pulling up his pants with his left hand as he pulled them down with his right--it occurred to me that this might be the ideal metaphor to describe the split-brained status of my own activist generation.
On the one hand, young Americans today are angry, confused and acutely aware of our domestic and global state of emergency. As the Iraq debacle spirals out of control, the US Army desperately funnels millions into new advertising campaigns designed to lure disillusioned youth into its ranks. An unprecedented prison boom continues to lock some 100,000 of us (particularly young men of color) behind bars while the government slashes funding for educational scholarships and other alternatives to youthful incarceration. Those of us blessed with the good luck of making it to college, like me, will graduate with an average of $20,000 in loans to be repaid at the same time that real wages stagnate and healthcare costs soar.
On the other hand, despite this litany of social crises, student mobilizations seem to be the sole property of our French contemporaries, not to mention our parents, with their nostalgic reminiscences of '68. Contrary to popular belief, apathy is not our generation's major obstacle. Our left brains are working furiously to catalogue and explain innumerable injustices, while our right brains scream that we must respond creatively. Our real impediment, then, is that we are a generation with an atrophied corpus callosum, utterly confounded about how to bridge our intellectual realizations about social problems with our imaginative capacity to enact solutions.
Consider that many of us got our first taste of student activism in the mid-1990s, during the Golden Age of the Exposé. Back then, most Americans knew nothing of the WTO, the maquiladora, the School of the Americas or even the ozone layer. Our collective ignorance, though disheartening, smacked of opportunity. It provided young activists with a simple, three-step road map to productive social engagement: Uncover, educate and mobilize. Remember watching Kathie Lee Gifford weep saccharine tears on national TV upon the revelation that her Wal-Mart clothing line was made by child laborers in Honduras? Continuing a long tradition of muckraking, young rabble-rousers helped shine the public spotlight on all sorts of hidden injustices.
But the post-9/11 landscape changed all that. Now that the Bush Administration has seized its radicalism and thrown all apologies to the wind, most Americans are no longer surprised to hear that our government is busy with the dirty tasks of empire-building: Dropping bombs. Tapping phones. Drilling reserves. Building jails. What role does this unabashed approach to US hegemony leave for student activists who might once have grabbed a bullhorn and, in a moment of youthful courage or foolhardiness, shouted before a massive crowd of silent followers: "Wait a minute! The emperor has no clothes!"
As students of the post-9/11 generation trying to live up to the legacy of our parents' radicalism, we face an emperor who is not only naked but is proudly tipping his cowboy hat in the direction of Abu Ghraib and smirking, "And don't I look sexy?" Within a post-denial Administration, scandal refutation has been replaced by scandal saturation. The result mirrors a neurological phenomenon known as "impaired response habituation," whereby the basal region of the brain makes it difficult for highly repetitive stimulus to penetrate our consciousness. Can you blame America's youth movement for not knowing how to begin?
This, of course, is where our corpus callosum might come in handy. We must begin rebuilding the intricate connections between our collective left brain (where we house our analytical critique of twenty-first-century woes) and our collective right brain (where we harbor our dreams that another world is possible). Already, young people are building this cross-hemisphere bridge--performing guerrilla theater, conducting counter-recruiting workshops, creating community-policing initiatives, writing feminist blogs and building transnational ties with youth activists around the world. Before long, we will hit our stride with Project Corpus Callosum: a much-needed mission to restore the space within our collective conscience where our radical imaginations meet our commitment to everyday action.
"America's Most Trusted Source of News: Ourselves" by Nikolas Bowie
We live in a culture in which opinions are the dominant form of political currency. People rarely regard opinions as valid sources of information. The word is defined by its subjectivity. Yet as we ridicule opinions for their inherent partiality, we arbitrarily esteem the opinions of political analysts simply because they are accompanied by the glare of television cameras and the buzz of punditry. As a result, instead of critically discussing political issues among ourselves, we depend on the bipolar opinions of news analysts to defend our own ambiguity.
Civic participation in the United States is less contingent on whether we vote than whether we tune in, and learning the latest buzzwords is easier than challenging conventional opinions. It seems that we would rather win an argument with vague abstractions than feasible proposals.
But opinions cannot form solutions. Only ideas can. While opinions are dogmatic weapons that we use to attack opponents, ideas are the practical results of public deliberation. Today, citizens cannot challenge political analysts as they can meteorologists by looking out the window. City hall petitions are bureaucratic and uninviting, and there are no publicly financed group discussion programs to debate contemporary issues. Without an atmosphere of public discourse, analysts' opinions not only remain unilateral but also dangerously indisputable.
Political debates have become televised lexical crapshoots. The proceedings now more closely resemble caricatured skits than substantive discourse. Participants do not deliberate and form negotiated conclusions but instead act like well-dressed faucets, deluging their opponents with as many opinions as they can dispense. Even more frustrating are the analysis afterward, in which so-called experts scrutinize the sideshow. Throughout, there are no opportunities for public interaction.
Communities should instead rally around local and national debates as microphones of expression and as tools for constructing policy. Where are New Orleans residents in the national dialogue about the future of their city? Why must one mayor represent the voices of millions of people scattered around the country? Where are the voices of students in Washington's discussion over the future of education policy? What do failing high school students think about vouchers and standardized testing? I do not think many analysts have bothered to ask them.
Programs like the Urban Debate League that organize interscholastic debate competitions are educational and help involve local communities in the larger political process. Admittedly, debate can sometimes act as an ivory tower from which people spot problems that no one wants to address. But without such lookout posts, the public might never discover constructive ideas.
Other underutilized alternatives include small-group discussion programs that culminate in town-hall style debates with local or state representatives. Such programs would not teach participants to argue with one another but rather train them to value both the merits and flaws of their own views as they engage directly opposing positions. Critical thinking is a fundamental skill for collaboration and consensus.
Consensus does not mean ideological moderation or active complacency. Extremism and political activism each have their purpose. Ideologically extreme positions have included the right to vote and the weekend, while political activism compels bystanders to march when they would otherwise remain seated. Activism and immoderation continue to give voices to minorities, from black Americans to conservative professors. Both inspire change.
But change arises only when private opinions are made into public ones, and when the individual will is transformed into a general will. When extremism is synonymous with inflexibility, it will always remain opaque in the public imagination. When activists embrace principles at the expense of practicality, real change will never blossom. Until issues are dissected and examined before they are implemented; until disenfranchised members of society are given the opportunity to speak with their minds in addition to their votes; and until change is based on who has the best possible solution rather than who has the most political power, division will equal divisiveness, and moderate complacency will be the only practical recourse.
A functioning democracy requires input from all of its members, especially those not in direct control of policy. The institutionalization of debating societies within local communities could involve more citizens within the democratic process and diminish the nation's reliance on commentators whose limited perspectives reflect limited interests. Democracy in the United States would profit from a more equitable form of public deliberation. This is not just an opinion. It is an idea.
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