But there’s one particular thing that I haven’t noticed people talking about ...
In the new Star Wars, the bad guys are young.
In the original Star Wars films, the struggle looked pretty much like an intergenerational struggle–fresh-faced Luke and Leia, barely out of their teen years, and Harrison Ford as Han Solo acting the world-weary cynic at the ripe old age of 35.
The good guys, the heroes, were the youth, the new generation who saw the corruption of the system and were moved to stand against it.
....
Star Wars is about liberals like George Lucas putting their hope in youth and youth culture to do what the New Deal Democrats of the World War II generation could not, to finally defeat bigotry and inequality and redeem the American dream.
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The problem, of course, is that there’s no guarantee whatsoever that history will progress as progressives wish it would generation by generation, or that youth in and of itself implies virtue. Today’s “The Man” was yesterday’s Angry Young Man; the System started somewhere.
...
Our enemies, the ones that matter, aren’t our parents or grandparents–the real enemies will be our classmates, our colleagues, our brothers and sisters, our friends. The real test of our generation won’t be our ability to overthrow the last generation–every generation succeeds at that, in the end, if only through the passage of time. It will be our ability to overcome ourselves.
