No Youth Is An Island

The following is an essay I submitted for a Vanity Fair contest, sometime during the 2005-2006 academic year.

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Every year the city of Chapel Hill closes off a portion of Franklin Street for a Halloween celebration that consists basically of 75,000 costumed youths parading around in varying degrees of sobriety, some of them not parading so much as stumbling. I went last year for the first time and I felt something while I was there. It was something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I don’t think any of the 75,000 other people there could either. Franklin Street felt as if everyone was taking one last collective breath in anticipation of something, but no one knew what it was that they were anticipating.

We, the youth of America, breathe it in the air and it gives us goose bumps on our arms. We live it and among it, letting it permeate and pervade in every pore of our society and culture. We were taught it in history class and told to write about it in our college admission essays. We see it every time we turn on the television, but it never ceases to amaze that CBS promotes it as much as MTV, the high priest of commercialism. We hear it when we listen to the radio, in the rap songs laden with sirens, gunshots, and gangsters but also on Bible-thumping flag-waving country music stations. It is impossible to avoid, unapologetic, and more relentless than Les Miserables' Javert. It is the idea of the rugged and self-reliant individual living the American Dream. And it is fading. Fast. Everyone loves to call America’s youth fat, lazy, stupid, spoiled, disillusioned, and apathetic. But America’s youth is waking up from the dream to realize that there is a crack undermining it, a contradiction that allows 75,000 people to get together and get drunk but once the party ends it is back to every man for himself. No man is an island John Donne wrote in his Meditation 17, yet our culture seems to be leaning towards further isolating ourselves from one another when all we need to do is pull together just a little closer. United we stand, divided we fall. We can all feel the fall coming, but being young and still inexperienced we’re unsure of how to catch ourselves.

Mount Rushmore features the faces of four presidents who we’ve come to associate with all the rugged and respected virtues of Americans. They were honest, brave men who did what was right even though they knew the risks. Declaring independence from the most powerful empire on Earth? Abolishing Slavery? No single man, not even a great one, could handle such tasks alone. Washington and Lincoln both had generals to support (and who supported) their causes. Jefferson sought help from James Madison and others when writing the Declaration of Independence. Mount Rushmore unwittingly celebrates the lost step in America’s thought process. We praise and remember the individuals who acted upon the will of the nation while simultaneously forgetting both the ideas they embodied and the fact that they alone were not the founders of America. We forget 56 people signed the Declaration, we forget the names and dates of Revolutionary and Civil War battles, and we never knew the names of the soldiers who fought in them or the wives who supported them. But we know Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt. Either we don’t realize or choose to ignore the reality that their greatness was born out of the actions of everyone. Americans knew something was amiss and they fixed it, together.

Since Mount Rushmore was completed there has been maybe one president, FDR, who would merit a spot on the mountain. Of course this is due largely to a lack of events with great leaders to immortalize. The Civil Rights movement’s champions were all assassinated and then there was Korea, Vietnam, an impeachment, an oil crisis, recession, and the end of the Cold War - nothing quite worth glorification. After World War II Americans seemed eager to move out of the city and into the suburbs so that they could get their own backyards, Cadillacs, and all the new wonders that a powerful economy was willing to sell them. Americans had become complacent consumers – there was no more rallying around worthy causes, ask the hundreds of thousands who remain slaves today, the millions with AIDS in Africa (and the millions more who will get it), or the third of the world’s population that lives on less than a dollar a day. We tell ourselves, those aren’t our problems, so we can sleep at night. We rationalize it with logistics, repeating our reasoning over and over again so that we convince ourselves we’re right. “I am only one person; what difference can I make?” Everybody loves the cowboy but no one wants to be one, not when he can buy the specially priced DVD/CD box set at Wal-Mart for $19.95 and get the experience in digital surround sound.

America’s youth is waking up and realizing that there is something wrong, that even though the American Dream might be coming true for some of them, there is something about the way that it is coming true that isn’t sitting right in our stomachs. Ironically enough it is the President of the United States who is unconsciously waking us up. He represents us and our voice; after all we did vote for him, though some people named Al Gore take exception to that. Bush is the epitome of American cowboy, complete with boots, horse, and hat. Yet the situation in Iraq shows that maybe the cowboy should have taken the time to round up a bigger posse before he went riding in guns a’ blazing to make things right. The mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina relief wasn’t his administration’s fault because ‘no one in the White House really knew what was going on’ when the rest of the world was tuned into channel 6 in awe of the terrible destruction. We might be fat, lazy, and stupid American youths but we’re not that stupid. These aren’t problems that are thousands of miles away in a country that we can’t locate on a map; they are problems in our own country, affecting other Americans just like us. I didn’t go to Iraq, but my brother did; and our mom was pretty happy to have him home again. Not everyone’s mom is so lucky. Two things you can’t get at Wal-Mart are second chances and sons.

America has taken mindless consumerism too far, creating and marketing things that we don’t need, things that we aren’t really sure exactly what they do or what they’re made of. Even lifestyles are advertised, glorified, and packaged in 12 ounce aluminum cans. A redeeming virtue of commercialism is that it built a large marketing machine that was used for charitable purposes, bringing in millions of dollars in donations from viewers. Famous actors, athletes, and two ex-Presidents solicited donations. They reminded us to keep in touch with humanity, especially our own brethren. The question is; will we stay in touch with one another? Will we continue to donate our money and our time to help the victims rebuild or will we go back to the living room couch, waiting to see which individual triumphs in the new season of Survivor? Donne’s Meditation 17 ends with this thought: Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

No man is an island, yet we Americans are not yet willing to exert the effort to rope together the islands of individualism that we have spent the past fifty years building, adding fancier and fancier additions as fast as the corporate world could provide them. The youth of America thinks the way the 75,000 people on Franklin Street felt, willing to consume to the point of excess, and still anticipating something more. We know that there is something more to be had, and we can’t quite put our fingers on it. But we’re getting a better idea of what it is. We’re thinking for ourselves and not about only ourselves. We are headed in the right direction. John F. Kennedy once said “Our task is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.” We do not need to blame anyone, even if they are at fault, for the wrongs that we faced yesterday and face today. We should not rally together only after a disaster; we should be rallying everyday, making sure we all get to live the dream.

I am reminded of a story from Halloween night, where a student I know was left without a ride home by his two roommates; yes, he could have been a tough individual and walked home, alone, in the dark. But how hard would it have been for his roommates, or any one of the 75,000 people on Franklin Street, to ask him if he needed a ride?