The Kids Aren’t Alright

Speaking of prejudice against conservatives , Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate , is worried that liberal children tend to be too viciously and close-mindedly partisan:

Our kids are raised on a steady diet of tolerance, but, given the chance, they signal allegiance by turning on whomever they can pin as a bad guy. They don’t get many chances at that, really. There just aren’t a lot of enemies in their lives. Railing against McCain supporters functions as a safe outlet for hostility and even hatred. For my sons Eli and Simon and most of their friends, die-hard Republicans are an abstract concept. They know people who differ from them by race and ethnicity and religion, and they get that it’s not OK to judge by those categories. On their soccer team are kids who are working-class rather than well-off, and I think they also understand that class isn’t a flag to rally around either. They may have met a libertarian or two, but they’ve never talked politics with a serious conservative.

And so I fear the election is teaching them not only about the joy of supporting an appealing candidate but also about the more vicious pleasures of despising the other side—with a zeal that’s usually off-limits to them. Also during the soccer carpool, the kids discussed a pumpkin with Obama carvings that had gotten smashed, and one of them said, “It must have been those McCain-loving teenagers.” Which led to a gleeful discussion about fighting back with bombs and guns. I winced. As did one of my colleagues over drawings her 3-year-old son did at synagogue this weekend. At first, he drew a stick figure with its arms raised. “That’s Obama,” he said to nobody. Then the stick figure reappeared, lying prone. “Dead McCain,” he muttered.

The really sad part is that this description fits a lot of hyper-educated twenty-two-year-olds I know.