In the original iteration of this site, i launched the short-lived “Pete Davis Riffs” with Adults in the Room: A Letter to Fellow Young People, a speech I wrote at the end of college in 2012:
https://youtu.be/_2IJw9HxKpY
I would like to take this opportunity to write to you as members of a particular generation at a special time in history.
By the time we came of age, a wall had fallen, a Cold War had ended, a crime wave had receded and a budget was balanced. We rang in the new millennium with hopes that the information superhighway and global trade would bring about a lifetime of peace and prosperity.
However, with every festive night comes the morning after. The SUVs that drove us to soccer practice became the greenhouse gases we were warned about in our teens. The big house our uncle bought had a foreclosure sign up five years later. Global trade and information networks came on the same wave as outsourced industries and global terror networks. Something had to give, and it did: levees broke, bubbles popped, economies crashed, and public trust bottomed out.
Having been the generation of kids who were raised on such safe touchstones as Tickle Me Elmo, Seinfeld reruns, and AOL Instant Messenger, and then suddenly flung into a world of Columbine, 9/11, and Katrina, it was no surprise that we thought the 2000s to be a great time to drop everything and play around with wizards at Hogwarts. Indeed, in times of shock and confusion, we tend to hide away in fantasy worlds: places with clear heroes and villains; nations with perfect presidents played by Martin Sheen; universes where the only available feedback option is a “like” button.
But when we return from these fantasies, we are left standing in a real world still facing rising inequality, a warming globe, and a continued struggle to have our humanizing endeavors catch up with our commercial ones.
For the past couple of years, we have had the luxury to reflect on the age we find ourselves in, but I will be the first to admit that, in this very real world, it is not always clear what is going on. We see a black president but read about the black unemployment rate. We are excited by the freedom that comes with the Internet, but still frustrated by the old power structures.
It seems that society, like us graduates, is in a transitional phase, an in-between state where it all seems out of sync. We use twentieth-century language to describe twenty-first-century problems; economic orders are collapsing; populist movements crop up right and left.
All the while, there remain big public problems — problems that are overwhelming and complicated. What is to be done in such an age?
Well, we have a choice.
We can turn a blind eye and retreat from the confusion of our era back into the safety of fantasy. Some have made that choice: those who choose to be cynical, who use irony to distance themselves from any conviction; those who yearn for nonexistent pasts when “everything was better”; and those who reject the great life in favor of their own big life.
Others look for a quick fix, like the election of a president who will solve our problems for us, or the hope that we will all take to the streets and — with enough noise — the problems will cease. To some, the quick fix is the vanquishing of the latest boogeyman: if only we got rid of the federal government, or Muslims, or Southerners, or immigrants, or evangelicals, then everything would be solved.
But it is never that easy. That is fantasy, too.
This leaves a final option: to reject these fantasies as childish. It is the option to be an adult, which is to say, “Yes, the problems we face are complicated; yes, the path forward is not always clear; yes, the solutions we need might take decades; but, because of this, it is even more important that we struggle!”
To be an adult is to be a participant in co-creating the world, not just another spectator watching others create it, or destroy it, for us. It is to think in the long term, putting sustainability over short-term gain. It is to back up complaints with hard work. To be an adult is to be childlike, but not childish — still able to use our imagination to envision new alternatives but ready to implement them ourselves. To be an adult is to have hope; it is to recognize that a world where people are good and ideas can sweep across the globe in seconds is a world where we can, with time, solve some of the great problems we face.
By this standard, some wielders of power are not acting like adults: they continue to play childish games with our economy, our democracy and our earth.
But we do not have to. We can be better. When we turn to each other and ask “Are you ready to enter ‘the real world’?” we do not have to mean, “Are you ready for the daily grind?” To continue the failed patterns of the old era and to expect that there will not be grave consequences is to not live in the real world. The real world desperately needs adults.
Are we going to be the last gasp of an old era or the first breath of a new one? If we want the latter, now is the time to be the adults in the room, to have the courage, wisdom, and grit to walk into the halls of power and utter the sacred phrase: “We are here to get to work.”