Bead 24: Generation Z

I've had a practice, as a mother, of taking my kid to places one doesn't normally see kids.  When he was born, I still had a couple of weeks left in my school semester.  No matter; I nursed him to sleep in physics class.  Just before his second birthday, he joined his dad and me for a long walk on the Appalachian Trail.  Shrouded in mosquito netting, and wearing diapers made of pack towels, he rode on my back for 700 miles.  As a toddler, he came with me to music festivals.  And while I was in graduate school, I once brought him to a keg party.  As I was tucking him into his sleeping bag in the backyard, a perpetually drunk and creepy classmate of mine leaned over us, and promised Zac a trip to a baseball game, along with his "babysitter" (me).  I stayed close to Zac the rest of the night.

Zac in his pack on the Appalachian Trail.

Zac is fourteen now, and gets more of a say on where he goes.  Since Inauguration Day, I've invited him to attend a dozen or so political affairs, including our local Women's March, a town hall, and numerous meetings of my peace group and environmental action team.  For some reason, he keeps turning me down.  It's not that he's not woke--he does fabulous impressions of our 45th president, cringes at the morning news, and relates with everything uttered by John Oliver.  It's just that he's, well, fourteen.  Meetings and marches are boring.

But a couple of weeks ago, I upped the ante.  I turned Congressman Tom McClintock's satellite office hours into a school assignment, and drug my sleepy-eyed ninth grader along.

My intentions were three-fold.  First, as a new homeschool parent, I was eager to round up real-world lessons for my son, experiences to personalize what would otherwise just be words on a page or screen.  Second, I wanted to get him out of the house.  We are, at this point, not affiliated with any homeschool charters or groups, and I am always conscious of the isolation factor.  Finally, I hoped Zac would find the civic engagement empowering.  Although I have no illusions that McClintock will enact any of my "radical leftist" ideas, I believe that what I say at his satellite office hours actually reaches his desk.  And that counts for something.

The day I brought Zac to McClintock's office hours, there were only six people in attendance, and the vibe was familial.  This many months into the new political renaissance, we mostly knew each other, and felt at home with Matt Reed, McClintock's field representative.  Although Matt's Twitter feed is disappointing, he has always been easy to work with and talk to, and today was no exception.

I had told Zac ahead of time that he wouldn't need to participate in the sound-off if he didn't want to.  After the meeting, to complete his assignment, he would need to email the Congressman about an issue of his choice.  But for now, he could just listen and take notes.

I should have known better.  Zac is opinionated, likes to talk, and is famously not-shy.  There was no scenario in which he would sit at a table buzzing with hot-button discourse, and not take part.

Moreover, Matt included him from the start.  He initiated the discussion by asking Zac what he thought of our government.  Zac answered confidently and precisely, as if he'd had time to prepare a response beforehand.  "I think we should do away with the electoral college," he said.  He went on to provide supporting details--the electoral college was established, many years ago, for an uneducated populace who couldn't be trusted to make informed voting decisions.  It had no place in the modern world, where inventions like the Internet supply a wealth of information on any candidate or issue we want to learn about.  In conclusion, it was obsolete, and should be dissolved.

Matt was impressed.  He complimented me on my homeschooling.  I explained that I couldn't take any credit, as I had only been his teacher for about two weeks.  He owed his big brains to--well, himself, and the good people at his K-8 school, from which he'd graduated in June.

After his initial stump speech, Zac made several quippy contributions.  Over the past few weeks, hurricane after hurricane had been ramming into the Caribbean and southeastern United States.  We naturally wanted to talk about climate change.  Matt naturally wanted to point out that McClintock, as a fiscal conservative, wasn't inclined to wreck the economy over something that was, in his world, still up for debate.  We countered with the reality that renewables are a burgeoning economic sector, and we risk getting edged out by China if we don't move forward.  Whereupon Zac said that favoring the development of fossil fuels over renewables, as most of McClintock's party seems to be doing, is as idiotic as Honda introducing a horse and buggy line. 

He got props for his wit.  One of my fellow cage-rattlers, Charlie, told Matt to "write that down and give it to your boss."

Later, we talked about debt.  Charlie was concerned about what he perceived as massive, and largely unwarranted, military spending.  Our wars in the Middle East had cost trillions of dollars to date.  We still had 30,000 troops in South Korea, a nation both economically stable and capable of defending itself.  And then there was the F35 program, which Charlie considered the poster-child of military waste.

He said that while our countrymen across the aisle liked to gripe about the "tax and spend Democrats," we needed to take a closer look at the "borrow and spend Republicans."

Here, Zac delivered another short treatise.  He said that debt was increasingly being treated as an asset.  Banks lend money to people, and benefit from the debts that accrue.  Similarly, corporations give money to politicians, and benefit when the politicians behave as though they are indebted to them.  He said it was like New Rome.  I am no history buff, and I didn't get the reference.  Possibly others didn't either, as there was no particular response from anyone.

After the fact, though, I did a little surfing, and learned that massive personal debt among Roman citizens contributed to the fall of the Empire.  The ruling class held the debts, and had the military at its disposal. Populist uprisings were quashed, and war tributes levied that only compounded the debts of the people.  By the second century A.D., one-quarter of the population was in bondage for unpaid debts.  Three centuries later, the economy collapsed and the Empire was finished.

It always smarts a little when your kid knows more than you do.

As we disbanded that day, Matt asked Zac what his favorite school subject was.  "Social studies," Zac replied, but quickly qualified that he didn't mean boring social studies, the kind with endless packets of photocopied text and busywork.  He meant homeschool social studies, in which you got to research famous assassinations.

Matt didn't act openly alarmed, but I did wonder if Zac's parting words could have landed us on The List.  Son of an obvious radical leftist issues a handful of his own radical leftist statements at a public forum, then reveals a personal obsession with assassination attempts.

Fortunately, assassination was not the theme of Zac's email to Congressman McClintock.  Instead, he reprised, in careful detail, his argument against the electoral college, and urged McClintock to consider introducing a bill to establish direct representation.

Those of us who live in California's 4th Congressional District know that McClintock only really considers what is already entrenched in his mind.  Still, I thought it was important to show Zac, my very own member of Generation Z, how it feels to get involved.  Speaking out for the first time, you may wonder where the words go once they've left your mouth.  Were they heard?  Do they make a difference?  But with more and more of us choosing to be outspoken, I feel it's only a matter of time.  We'll turn this thing around.

Zac on his last day of eighth grade.