Over the summer, my father went to see "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's documentary about global warming; apparently it's not just a prediction any more. Among the unexpected consequences of my father's viewing of this film was a heightened sense of ire about the behavior of today's youth. "You guys,"-that is to say our generation-"just plug into your f-ing computers and your f-ing cell phones and ignore everything else. Where's your anger? Where are the marches and rallies and sit-ins and walk-outs? Where are your righteous leaders?" I'll spare you most of the harangue, but another little nugget he is fond of saying is "with all these new ways to communicate, WE STILL HAVE NOTHING TO SAY!" You have parents too, so maybe this kind of talk is not unfamiliar to you. And this is not at all unique to us; the youth of every generation are routinely characterized as being selfish, myopic, unwise and lacking perspective. The same can be found in matters of taste: your great-grandparents scolded your grandparents for listening to "whorehouse reefer music" (jazz) just as your parents scold you for listening to "degenerate, violent crack music" (hip-hop), using many of the same arguments and a surprisingly similar set of terms ("it's not even music!").

As many of you probably do at home, I often try to stand up for my generation, to defend my peers from the slings and arrows of curmudgeonly diatribe. But last week's biggest headline- front page news in The Amherst Student, with two opinion columns to match-has left me at something of a loss. The mass outrage surrounding facebook.com has led me to a familiar conclusion about our generation: we are selfish, myopic, unwise and severely lacking in perspective. It's the worst thing we can possibly imagine: our parents are right about us. Here is what I've learned:

1) Lack of perspective: The petition against The Facebook News Feed represents the largest organizational force our generation has ever assembled, with some 750,000 students joining forces within 48 hours. When my parents say "where is your outrage" about the current state of affairs, I can point at this list and hide my face in shame, because ostensibly The Facebook News Feed is more worthy of our anger than the government's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, a morally bankrupt war in Iraq, the bombings in Lebanon or the woeful lack of transparency surrounding the 9/11 attacks. In fact, if one were to add up the number of students in Facebook groups dedicated to those issues, it would probably fail to reach six figures. I know the argument is kind of specious: people certainly care about things that evade Facebook groupings (as hard as that is to believe), and of course caring about facebook.com does not preclude you from caring about corruption, disaster and abuse. Still, it reflects badly on us that this has been our generation's most significant rallying point to date. It doesn't help at all that the "political" groups that seem most popular on facebook.com are along the lines of "Liberals Are Intellectually Superior And, Oh Wait, We're Also Hotter," which is to me an endless source of embarrassment.

2) Myopic: High-minded think-pieces about facebook.com in student newspapers across the country will have kids scurrying for their Rousseau and Locke, citing their right to privacy and freedom. If you're like me, you find this all very funny, considering that the news feature takes information the user him/herself chooses to display for public consumption and distributes it to people who already have access to that information, at a faster and more convenient rate. What I don't find funny is the relative lack of indignation surrounding a set of bylaws railroaded through the Congress not five years ago that actually do threaten our privacy and freedom; where were we with our Voltaire and Kant when The Patriot Act (parts one and two) passed? Where are the Facebook groups decrying racial profiling, the detainment of suspects without probable cause, the use of wiretaps without a warrant ... you know, actual invasions of privacy that result in actual punishment, often of a cruel and unusual nature?

3) Unwise: Thoughtful commentators have been saying for years that the Internet has a dark underbelly, and harbors within its more utopian ideals the seeds of disruption. Our generation, wonderfully innocent of thoughtful commentary as we are, seems to have just now realized that web space is an abyss best traversed cautiously. I would compare this "revelation" to the Watergate scandal: to careful observers of history, there was nothing at all surprising about Richard Nixon's behavior, but for a great many people whose faith in the office of the Presidency remained undeterred in 1974, it represented a major blow to their faith in public institutions. Quite simply, we should have all seen this coming, and the depth of our outrage betrays the degree to which we have failed to thoughtfully engage the potentialities of our brave new world.

4) Selfish: This point is really a summary of the last three, so instead of repeating myself, I turn to song lyrics. One of my dad's favorite bands is Steely Dan. A prominent lyric in "Showbiz Kids" stands out in his mind as being particularly apt: "Showbiz kids making movies of themselves / You know they don't give a fuck about anybody else." The verses describe the various endeavors of said showbiz kids, as the chorus explains, "While the poor people sleeping with the shade on the lights / While the poor people sleep and all the stars come out at night." It's hard to disagree with them at this point. There's nothing our generation adores more than Me-Media (Facebook, Myspace, etc.), which probably means there's nothing we adore more than Me-Media's subject: ourselves.

Mostly, I think the News Feed-inspired outrage is hilarious. It's funnier still that this is what it took for our generation to show its true colors. I just hope my dad doesn't watch "An Inconvenient Truth" again in the near future, because I will be forced to agree with him when he says "your generation is a lost cause."

Richardson is a senior studying anthropology and sociology and music.