Why don’t young people care about history anymore?

They don't care any more or less about history than your generation did. You're just looking to rant about "kids today"

Being critical of Israel has nothing to do with the Holocaust. Your generation supports Trump, a guy who brunches with Kanye and Nick Fuentes

R1, it depends on how they’re raised, I think. We touched on this in the ‘Do young people watch old movies anymore?’ thread.

I think a lot of young people are growing up seeing their parents with a phone in their face 24/7. And that’s it. Their worldview is whatever TikTok tells them it is on any given day.

Sorry, that was meant for OP.

R1 The main point of my post was not about Israel, that was just a side comment. The main idea is that the younger generations just don’t care about history in general. And they don’t. I’m asking why.

They're so "quick to turn on Israel" because it is committing horrible, murderous atrocities that they can witness daily on their social media. Pictures, videos of the slaughter. In fact, if they knew more about history they would have much more contempt for the state of Israel based on its historical record since 1947 (but this has largely been kept from them.)

I’m dying to know your opinion R5. What exactly was Israel supposed to do after October 7? Just smile and nod?

I don't even think it's up for debate anymore that tiktok and the like really decides much of what a young person is into.

I use it too. The algorithm is fucking powerful. It can keep me sated for a long time and feeds me exactly what I want. There is no choice on my part. Meaning, I don't search for anything like I might do on Twitter. It just knows. It's alarming how easy it is to be lulled into submission.

But I 'm on it an hour a day. Maybe. And I read books. And read newspapers. And watch documentaries about history and anything else, really. And have 20 years of adulthood before TikTok was invented.

Young people are really fucked. Not all of them, of course. But enough.

My son is a history major, FWIW, and his school had trips to Boston, NYC, and every two years to London+Edinburgh. He also spent two weeks in Italy with his Latin teachers. I also really pushed history on him, even explaining the context to TCM movies.

Why don’t young people care about… the world anymore? Working? Being Kind? Growing a backbone?

My Boomer parents barely know any history. They don't even read newspapers, let alone books. I am more educated and read a lot more than they do. I think it's as it always has been: there are swathes of people who mostly care about money, family and then there are some people who have more intellectual interests. And you'll be more likely to mix with people like you.

Don't forget that the Holocaust was a lot more recent history for that generation than for young people today - my grandfather was in the airforce during WWII for example - so obviously they'd be hearing more first hand experience. about it.

I'm a late millennial and I adore history. Folk music has always been my particular history "sweet spot," but I also adore photographs from the 20th century. I love old TV, I'm even someone who has enough brain cells to watch old episodes of Dick Cavett when I'm really bored. I'm that person who looks up everything's Wikipedia page, whether it be Post-It notes or Kentucky Fried Chicken. I have truly a garbage trap mind.

When I was growing up I didn’t really enjoy history. Wasn’t till after age 30 that I got into history and appreciated it.

Because they’re a bunch of TikTok addicts who thrive on narcissism; in other words, too fixated on themselves, their gender identities and scrolling through feeds.

I suspect it's a subject that is not well taught. I'm not American, but I know the syllabus in my country in schools is bits of this and bits of that: they don't get to see any of the sweep of history, yet the "bits" aren't captivating storytelling either.

On the other hand, there are some fantastic history podcasts available, and it's sad they don't want to listen to them. But, to be fair, most of my Boomer friends aren't interested either. If anyone listens to podcasts at all it's all about "true crime". I think R10 is right: we live in a world where interest in anything outside yourself and your family (or your fandom/whatever you coalesce around online) is apparently just not interesting. YouTube is the most incredible resource: you can see almost anything on there that happened post the invention of film, as well as docos about what happened before that. But all people want it for is puppies barking at mirrors and girls with big lips telling them how they should do their hair.

There is a war going on against intelligent thought, and the push to focus people on rubbish all the time is part of it. It benefits people who want their power to be unquestioned (including the tech billionaires), and it also benefits people who want to be lazy and only hear what they want to hear, so no wonder it's a hit.

I have a friend who teaches at an Ivy-adjacent school. He tells me that his students cannot read a map. As in, they cannot tell you north is up, south is down, etc. If you handed them a map and asked them to find something, they would be completely lost.

I saw a TV show where they asked teenagers to navigate a car across a couple of suburbs using an old-style street-map, and it was just as R15 says. I thought it was hilarious because they all acted exactly like older people confronted with a new technology, about which teenagers are so quick to be patronizing. You could see their brains just revolting in the same way. They went to pieces, and could not force themselves to learn to do it even though others were trying patiently to coach them. The smarter the teenager, and the more proud they were of their intelligence, the worse they fared.

I've always wanted to do a "man of the street"-type experiment, where I ask passers-by to locate countries on a world map. Not countries like Djibouti or Estonia or Uruguay. But rather, the US, Russia, Brazil, China.

I have always loved history. Born that way. I can remember reading historical biographies about all kinds of American figures. when I was 8 years old. And of course in school we were taught history. It was required to graduate, American History and Government. The World History course was too. It was just a survey course, but it whetted my interest. A few months ago, my sisters and I went to Egypt. I felt like a huge flaw in what we were taught was the lack of much attention to India, Russia, and China. The perspective was a European perspective. So if we talked about India it was about the British in India. That kind of thing. There was a time when I was in high school when my ambition was to be an archaeologist.

Chinese history and culture are fascinating to me, r18. And so many sources remain untranslated.

Yes, R19, I agree. I think Africa was another neglected area, unless we talked about it from the perspective of colonization. Basically, how can we talk about "world" history, while ignoring so much of the world, right?

As for map reading. I can remember learning about topography in junior high! We didn't just study traditional maps that we're all familiar with, we studied them for other features. Geography and social studies were important.

Like anything, you have to have aptitude for it, and aptitude has to be cultivated. I taught history for awhile on the college level and it was very much a self selected passion back then. Now the problem is the kids have so many options for learning, they can't tell true from false and they don't have the intellectual grounding to make profound moral judgments.

OP most young people are well aware of the Holocaust and perhaps because of the distance of time may be better able to rationalize such cognitive dissonances of your generation as:

1) Why do Israelis keep bringing up the Holocaust in regards to Palestine when neither Palestine nor any Arab nation, had anything to do with the Holocaust?

2) If Israelis are still mad about the Holocaust, why aren’t they asking the Germans for some of their lush, forested, temperate land?

3) If Western Europeans and Americans really felt bad about letting the Holocaust happen, why didn’t they encourage large scale Jewish emigration into their countries instead of sending them off to an outpost in the desert? It’s almost as if they were trying to create a friendly ally to wedge themselves into Middle East affairs.

4) Why do Israelis keep bringing up the Holocaust when indiscriminately bombing a segregated population of peoples on whose displaced land they settled on?

Because historically "young people" have never cared about history.

R23 Your comment reminds me of some ancient Sumerian tablets that when translated turned out to be a rant about 'today's kids' and their bad behavior during lessons. They wouldn't listen and all they wanted to do was horse around.

On the other hand history is usually very poorly taught or even understood by most teachers, at least in public schools.

[quote]history is usually very poorly taught

This. There's a lot of whining about the kids as if it's their fault but WHO is teaching them? Or not teaching them, as the case might be. If no-one bothers to teach you the basics, is that really your fault. Unless you're some autodidact which frankly isn't most people at all, otherwise why have schools.

This is an article from 2015. However bad you think zoomers are, they look like the silent generation compared to gen alpha. This is a mostly American problem brought on by the pure terror of our pure unrestrained capitalism and culture of egoism. Go see what teachers are saying - even students in advanced tracks in public education are barely literate by the standards of ten years ago, when education was already brutally wounded by Bush era policy. They're just fraudulently passing students en masse now. Two parents working full time can barely support their own lives let alone one or several children - therefore the kid is raised by the screen. From infancy to adulthood they experience a nonstop barrage of consumerist propaganda designed to produce a few categories of helpless idiots - worker drones, scam and con marks, pro austerity voters, pharma dependent. They are never going to pay attention to a book or an academic lesson because the childs mind is inherently drawn to the fast dopamine rollercoaster of online content and social media. The hyperstimulating world of social media and content has usurped the local real world in value and importance and humanity is doomed because we aren't going to meet the challenge of climate catastrophe - organize society has 3-4 decades left around the world.

This all goes back to the No Child Left Behind education policies of the Bush II Administration. It became all about teaching kids how to take tests, basically preparing them to become mindless drones that know how to punch buttons unquestioningly on a cash register. Now after a generation of not teaching history and civics, it's baked into the cake. Add in social media addictions and nobody reading books or newspapers anymore.

But keep voting for Republicans people, they have great policies!

R22 has proven that people don't care about history through his comments which show a complete misunderstanding of.... history.

We are making so much history in real time, there isn't any time for ancient history. Make a history app. The only way to reach young people is thru their phones.

As an example, can I mention that Rachel Maddow has a new book out about Fascism in America and it is a HISTORY book. About shit that happened decades ago. Incredible read. We have to read history so we have context for what is going on now. We can learn from it. We can borrow from it. The Military academies, West Point, and Annapolis are all about history. We celebrate George Washington as a great leader during the Revolutionary War. But he almost lost everything; the crossing of the Delaware River was an act of total desperation, a "Hail Mary" pass. Wellington nearly lost the battle of Waterloo. When Woodrow Wilson was POTUS more than 30,000 Ku Klux Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. He hosted a screening of Birth of a Nation in Washington D.C.

It’s a perfect storm of reasons. One is the shift in parenting that happened around the mid-90s, where parents started raising kids to believe the world revolved around them. Another is our culture, which decided to stop showing any regard for basic values or common decency, and instead double down on self-centered narcissism and aggression. Then there are the terrible role models we promote for them. And of course the addiction to their devices, to a point where they barely even look up for one second, much less look back to prior decades. The question shouldn’t be why is this happening. The question should be why are we surprised?

They do care - they loved Hamilton.

Hamilton is proof that POC were instrumental founding the United States.

It's the fucking charter school and home schooling trend. The fucking "Christians" don't want to expose their kids to public education. And the State Boards of Education have relaxed certain requirements due to political pressures. It's disgusting. It's been 22 years since 9/11 2001 and a lot of kids have no idea of what happened.

Yes, R32 it's an example of how to get through to kids with rapping history to them with catchy tunes. Personally I loved it. I saw it twice. But historically it got a lot of facts wrong..

^^^Apparently, people don't get sarcasm anymore, either.

I grew up in the 50's. Cowboys were popular TV shows. Indians were always the bad guys. It took years to discover how Jackson's Manifest Destiny enabled genocide. It took years to discover that young indian children were forced to go to "Christian" Schools and stop speaking their native tongue and learn English. Speaking the dialect of the Lakota Sioux was illegal and they were severely punished. I don't have a problem with them learning English, but I have a huge problem with them not being allowed to speak their own language or celebrate their own culture. I had to seek out books like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to learn what happened. We have done some real shitty things. The Suffragette Movement was riddled with acts of cruelty by men who were terrified of women getting educated, or working or voting. And let's not even talk about The Gay Rights movement or what we have been subjected to over centuries.

R11 is a dilettante.

[quote] Chinese history and culture are...

...totally ignorable.

What R3 said. It's the parents. I grew up watching old Hollywood movies with my mother after school. She'd read to us before bed about things and place in different eras which got me thinking and interested in the answers. Parents who don't read and are addicted to SM raise kids to do the same.

I remember the case of a child here killed and tossed into the bay in a suitcase by his mother and her bf because the little boy was interrupting their gaming.

Some people are curious. Others are not. If you are curious then you will explore things naturally, including history, even if it's just history about something you enjoy - sports, buildings, farming, technology. If you are incurious then you suck and live a pointless existence.

The “OK Boomer” thing also didn’t help. A whole generation has been inundated to believe that the (in some ways valid) problems of a generation should translate into complete disrespect for anyone over forty. The consensus position is that everyone who came before them has fucked up and should not be respected.

I am a public school teacher. The students I have today are the children of the students I had two decades ago. They weren’t social media addicts then, but they are now, and their children are even worse. There is no need to know anything, because they can simply Google the information when they need it, then promptly forget it. They have no concept of how all the pieces fit together or how we need to study history so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

On a related note, I work with gay high schoolers and every year try to get them to put together a Gay History display for LGBT History Month: Alan Turing, Langston Hughes, Harvey Milk, etc. They simply do not care about what previous generations went through. They know Freddie and Elton because of the movies. They don’t feel a kinship, or empathy, and pride is just about rainbow cupcakes.

R37 — I love books and am writing a book (nonfiction) this winter. I tried getting into Updike in recent history, but he was so drab and boring. I think the pages in my "Rabbit, Run" paperback would be better suited as wallpaper. Maybe firestarter.

I am probably a dilettante in a way as you so pertinently stated, but I very much have an interest in knowing a lot about things. I guess Jeopardy! is just filled with dilettantes like me. I love my "piece of shit plastic and micro-circuits" and how I get some real knowledge at times from it. The World Wide Web was founded on a single principle: to compile the world's knowledge into one network that any computer could access, worldwide. Not to detest young people on a nearly forgotten paid forum with the world's cattiest gays.

TikTok has seriously damaged society and hence I've never used it. I do watch YouTube shorts every now and then— but I discover I learn absolutely NOTHING and it is not even worth my time. Maybe if I was stoned or something.

If the older generations cared so much about history, why did none of you fuckers ever learn from it?

People who read are also much more empathetic than those who don't. Thanks to SM addictions, we have an entire generation that lacks empathy. It's not good to have a nation of narcissistic sociopaths.

I have no respect for people who are not the least bit intellectually curious.

That's the human condition R44. Don't lump every "old" person together just as you can't lump every millennial in with blue haired, whiny non-binaries.

I'm a high school teacher and used to be a college professor. I've dealt hundreds-- thousands-- of students. They are interested in the world around them no less than previous generations. There are a lot of dumbshits, but the girls especially care about things.

"Because history is so OOOLD and BOOORING! Everybody's dead and everything was in black and white!"

To be honest, I didn't care about history myself until I was in my twenties. But that was only because when I was in school, every year they began with why the pilgrims left England and only once did we get as far as The Civil War. We always seemed to get stuck on the period when the Native Americans were trading with the French. Then the school year would end and at the start of the next year, we were back in England boarding the Mayflower. It seems like we actually spent more time studying Greek mythology (don't get me started on how tedious and boring that was!) than actual history. I learned more when I began studying it myself and found the Russian revolution and WW II fascinating.

r47 Funny how you didn't criticise OP or the countless others in this thread for lumping all young people together

R50 I don't have the time or initiative to go after every poster here.

Funny way to say hypocrite

Not really.

I’m going to add to my comment and give myself a bit of parental credit. On every family vacation we always made it a point to go to museums and learn about the place we were visiting. Even short Galveston beach trips had opportunities to learn about the past (visit the Galveston Railroad Museum if you ever find yourself there) and we made sure to include those every time. Now my son is a history major, as I mentioned above, and visits one of the Smithsonian museums almost weekly. In fact, we were looking at a few Thomas Cole paintings last weekend at the National Gallery of Art and are now planning a trip to the Hudson Valley/Catskills for next summer.

Even skipping a museum offers opportunities: we’ve been to London many times as a family and this time, we spent time walking around Whitechapel while I told my son what I had learned from the book The Five, which is a fascinating history of the Ripper victims and of Whitechapel. And we visited the redone Battersea Park and learned all about its history. Parents and teachers just have to make it interesting and to me, that’s so easy because history is everywhere.

I’m one of the Gen Zers on here and I’m not a fan of my generation, nor do I share their interests.

I also don’t think Gen Z should be the authority on what qualifies as good or not good. There’s tons of great singers from the past that are hardly known by my generation today. Does that mean those singers weren’t talented? No.

Exactly, r33. And they did it through the power of rap.

Later, a gender neural polycule generation defeated the savage Indians of the plains through bebop jazz, and the American Empire was born

Sorry that history précis was for r32. But r33 is free to enjoy it, too

The Inkspots R56. Fucking great old music.

We have been here before..

While we're ranting about history-ignorant, jargon-spewing, tiktok-addicted children, let's remember that tonight (Nov. 9th) marks the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

R61 what does that photo remind me of?

Oh that’s right

They stopped teaching about US history years ago. They don't want the kids to understand our history. That way our constitution can be changed. We fought for our independence. Many countries did not, like Australia. They were given their independence by Great Britain in 1901. This is the change that will destroy us.

I think it's actually because they aren't aware that history is a thing that exists, OP. :(

Does watching documentaries like this count?

[quote] Thanks to SM addictions, we have an entire generation that lacks empathy.

Yes. May all youngsters aspire to the level of empathy currently being displayed by the majority of Baby Boomer and Gen X Americans.

[quote]It became all about teaching kids how to take tests, basically preparing them to become mindless drones that know how to punch buttons unquestioningly on a cash register.

Having just come from the thread about how we are now forced to self-serve at supermarkets, that policy might have been strangely visionary.

[quote]I'm a high school teacher and used to be a college professor. I've dealt hundreds-- thousands-- of students. They are interested in the world around them no less than previous generations.

Yes, they ARE interested in the world around them, but not in the world before they were born. They have no context for today's problems because they don't understand the way history works, nor the solutions which have been applied in the past to problems they worry about now. An example: they don't understand what the rise of fascism looks like, consequently they don't realize they are staring it in the face.

On the contrary, young people perfectly understand what fascism looks like.

The problem is with older generations who do not realize they have become fascists.

I'm an historian, and I teach at a small university.

I find the opposite to be true, OP. Yes, I have plenty of students in core curriculum courses who are taking the course to fulfill a requirement, who do not like history. In upper level course, I teach history majors, but there are always non-history major students. And I teach an upper level core curriculum course that is not a history course per se, but I approach the topic of the course through my discipline. Those students are curious about history. Many of them did not take history courses, because there's a lot of reading and writing. Still, they're curious.

I do not think they had effective teachers in their academic careers.

What appalls me is the lack of curiosity about the world around them and ignorance of current affairs. But that's not just young people. There are so few who read newspapers on a daily basis. I'm a newspaper junkie (got it from my parents). I'm 60. Few of my peers in college read the newspaper.

What happens on the other side of the world in the Middle East, Asia, the southern hemisphere, Ukraine, you name it, affects us all. We should understand the historical roots of conflicts and relationships today. Americans (young, middle-aged, and older) generally have a lack of understanding or even interest outside their narrow, parochial interests.

[quote] What happens on the other side of the world in the Middle East, Asia, the southern hemisphere, Ukraine, you name it, affects us all. We should understand the historical roots of conflicts and relationships today.

You totally sound like a teacher there! I felt like I was getting a stern telling off and forced to face the wall ;) love and agree with your comment though.

Thank you, R71.

R69, have you looked at the most recent polls about young people's voting intentions in the US? Scary.

I agree, R70, and it is particularly distressing because there are several really good history podcasts, and also podcasts designed to explain current affairs, which you'd think would be a method by which the young could take it in. Some of them even have comedians acting in the role of the "learner" to ensure it's amusing. But no, same story as YouTube: even smart people seem to only want to engage with the fluffy stuff.

Can I share a fun fact I discovered on a history podcast today? The question was why Shakespeare wrote so many sonnets (157, I think it was). The answer was--because he was in lockdown! There were at least two or three years of his career during which the theatres were dark because of plague, and sonnets were what he could sell to keep making a living. Ten years ago we could all have heard that and gone, hmm, interesting, and forgotten about it, but hearing it today was a stunning reminder of how close we are to history.

Because many young people today have zero inquisitiveness about anything, from the past, the present, or the future. They are only capable of wondering about whatever they can see at any given moment. And even then their inquisitiveness is minimal. Thinking hurts their brains, so they try to do it as little as possible.

Conversely, have you looked at recent polls about older Anerican’s voting intentions? Even scarier.

“Young people have zero inquisitiveness and have doomed America!” - older people who are responsible for this:

OP is a very good example of the kind of older person whose age and accumulated biases have rendered them less rational than a young person. No rational person has a favorable view of the Israeli government of Netanyahu.

History?

People today don’t care about facts. Gay, straight, left, right, trans, bi, young, MAGA this is what unites their thinking——believing stuff that fits your world view as truth because it fits your world view or just making up shit and claiming it’s true because that is what people on forums and the internet do.

Checking sources checking actual numbers looking at data—-that makes you look old. History is now what you claim it was. No need to study it,

History used to be more a part of a good education in the U.S. The better students from the better schools came away with a knowledge of events and time periods and what forces affected how each looked in terms of politics, law, cultural movements, architecture, city planning, art, and literature, with a sense of the different things at okay at different times. Those who got the bare bones rote learning came away with dates and events and names of presidents and maybe a picture of westward expansion but at a level of states and state capitals and stars added to flags.

Now it seems in many people that their sense of the past has no nuance. The Civil War and Reconstruction if the 1860s-1870s are as far away as the revolution and new government of the 1770s-1780s and the pilgrims and Stonehenge were maybe a few years before that. People get a stupid expression contemplating anything "olden days" and their grandfather's childhood and the Vikings may as well be one and the same time. It's just quaint and curious and slightly comical (those pilgrim shoes!) but quite meaningless and with even less connection to the present. History is a fleeting bemusement, there's nothing to be learned there, no interest to be found.

With most young people today if they can't find it on their smart phone they're not interested.

It's firepower & wealth, IMO. America holds a monopoly on violence for the entire planet, and we've been in the Pax Americana since WW2. We know 100% what our government and major corporations will do, and that's destroy anything that is a threat to the status quo of profit-making. That's all that's needed to exist as a person in the developed world. We're in a gray blob of mediocrity where most Americans are fat/rich (by global standards) and entertained by new shiny things. For better or for worse, people will never go back to dying en masse for causes in the developed world, so those old conflicts seem like a distant memory. If somehow American society disintegrates over the next 100 years and people are truly living rough again, maybe people will look to the past. But even if things degrade slightly & the federal government is forced to increase spending on the elderly/guarantee work to able-bodied people/disperse UBI, the situation will never really be analogous to anything in the past. It will be incremental, mostly peaceful change, not violent revolution. Obviously academia will always be there to produce very interesting research, regional skirmishes will always be a thing in the rest of the world, and there will always be gays like me obsessed with royalty and beautiful old things lol. But the present is just too different (and we're too rich) right now to draw any meaningful comparisons for most people.

Who are all these young people that you guys know so well?

[quote] History used to be more a part of a good education in the U.S.

Most kids aren't even taught how to write in cursive anymore. They're allowed to use calculators in math class, and tablets in other classes to look up all the answers they're too lazy and/or stupid to learn on their own.

R82

Yes as you say, no real wars in the future . In fact if every one held a flower instead of a gun there would never have been any wars.

I have always been a reader, and though i liked history, i only started reading history books in my fourties. I do think you have to have lived a little to truly enjoy it.

I also think that it is not only kids, most people aren’t really interested as well (as they aren’t in general in other more intelectual pursuits).

I'm not referring to young people specifically, but to the majority of adults I encounter: 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. Their level of understanding of History, whether as a discipline or as a fairly useless list of events and dates, is dim. History is quaint, it's cute, it's good for a laugh, now where are we going to eat. It has no connection to the present world for most people.

If you meet an American who has have some knowledge of History and is able to draw connections between past and present, he or she is probably studied History in college, went to excellent schools, has some career related to the discipline, or is an ardent hobbyist of some sort.

I think young people today are very conscious about what happens to the Environment. I think they are actively engaged in promoting an end to gun violence. They are much less racist and homophobic, etc. I think those who are more politically conscious in the here and now, will eventually back into learning about history. It's inescapable. But I think it will be current political issues that motivate them.

They don’t read books- at all. They get their info social media and Google. Closest they get to history is Wikipedia and I’ll bet they don’t even get through that!

R88

I am not disputing that. I do wonder if there is much support for that.

For instance, how are the youth of today combating gun violence? What are they actually doing.

I agree, R89, but I think the books will come later. This is anecdotal, but my younger sister was apolitical until Hillary and Obama. Then with Trump she is much more engaged and she is in her late 40's. She always read fiction. Good fiction, literature, but not history, and now all of a sudden she is reading a lot of non f iction, and learning about things that happened in the past. She's been f ascinated with WW II. lately. The other thing that draws interest is movies. There are a lot of historical movies out here, about people or events. it sometimes generates enough interest so that someone will open a book. My sister saw Oppenheimer than bought the biography, American Prometheus. the biography. So it may seem like younger people aren't interested in history, but I think they learn it differently than we did.

R90 there are several groups out here that are finally working together, And David Hogg from Parkland has been very active, traveling to various states to organize and work on campaigns to elect people who will vote for gun safety reforms. Max Frost is a U.S. Congressman now. He was part of the Parkland teens who survived the mass shooting. State legislative seats too. They're making reforms and the banning of the AR 15 central to any politicians' platform. They have been getting involved in other areas too. local elections for school boards, council seats, county commissions and state legislatures. Voting Rights is another issue they're passionate about.

R92

Yes I understand that there are people and groups trying to combat gun violence. There has been for decades. CDC is one .

You mention two people. That hardly qualifies as the youth of America working together to stop gun violence.

Let’s see how many register to vote and actually vote in 2024. Let’s see how many laws are changed as far as guns because of those votes. Let’s see even when successful how many wins are because of youngsters carrying the day.

So far I remain unconvinced but hopeful you might be right even if either of us have absolutely no clue if you are correct.

To be fair, R77, young people being led by groupthink into hating Hillary Clinton is also a big reason why Trump got elected. There was no respect for all she had accomplished or all the storms she had weathered. Young people didn’t even care to learn about her beyond what they were told by the conservative media or Bernie Bros, who started to sound pretty much the same.

R92 There are far more than two. And these aren't advocacy groups like the CDC. This is about political activism, organizing and working to get the kind of people elected that will do something. They were involved in several campaigns and are building a movement with a strong organization. You'd do well to look into what's going on.

R95

Nope I will wait to see the election time wins and the changes on gun laws. I am far too old to care about effort that does not produce good results. If the younger generation registers and turns out in great numbers to vote next election I will become a believer.

I am not sure what you mean by cdc being an advocacy group?

They have an injury prevention program and they collect data ( when Congress does not forbid it) on gun related deaths. It’s the latter Congress attacked cdc for.

[quote]Checking sources checking actual numbers looking at data—-that makes you look old.

Because those ancient Fox News viewers are so well known for checking sources.

This thread just serves to show how pathetically twisted older people will get to whine about young people, while actually describing themselves.

But sure, keep trying to convince yourselves that up until about twenty years ago all children were history buffs and that young people being self-obsessed and less curious about the past is a totally new phenomenon.

r96 Oh, so young people just have to solve gun violence to prove themselves? What a fucking ridiculous position. And by the way, where's the condemnation for the older generations who failed to tackle it? Oh no, that's right, everything must be blamed on the young.

This is the world you old fucks bequeathed. If you don't like it, you only have yourselves to blame. Maybe you all should've taken some of the advice you're now condescendingly doling out to young people.

R98

The young don’t have to prove a fucking thing. They can do as nothing as they want. Or as much as they want. They can even be on opposite sides of the same issue. Pro gun and anti gun pro choice and anti abortion, pro war anti war, as they will be.

The young can even talk as much as they want about things they are not involved with fixing but have opinions on

Someone here on this thread made the suggestion that young people were organized and making great progress on things like gun control, they were involved and making progress on several issues confronting society.

I call that absolute bullshit. But I will start to believe that poster might be right when I see results.

Until the results come in it’s just bullshit and opinions.