It was with unexpected interest that I read Elizabeth Spiers’s “guest essay” for the New York Times over the weekend, titled “Dear Boomers, the Student Protesters Are Not Idiots,” and not just because it was akin to a brief visitation from the tattered ghost of cocaine-addled early 2000s New York City online scenester “journalism.” (She was the founding editor of Gawker, although she left when it was still just a catty, petty upstart devoted to vandalizing the pieties of the New York publishing scene rather than the worst den of sleaze to ever exist.) Now she lectures to journalism students at a prestigious school — a very apropos post-career sinecure — and is here to tell us that she knows these kids, she has met these kids in her classes, and people like me are simply just getting these kids all wrong.
Ha! What rubes. She chalks up this misapprehension to the generation gap — hence the title of the piece — and says that it’s less about politics (though that obviously plays some kind of role, she concedes with distinct vagueness) than it is about a generational divergence in attitudes toward protest.
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