Today, as this Baby Buster/Gen Xer spoke with her Baby Boomer professor, the world of history was to be written in front of our eyes. As he spoke of the pathetic performances on the Western Civ mid-terms and compared them to the graduate seminar whose sole intent this semester is to try to objectify the term nationalism. I told him of my days working with youth, and how many of them had no idea what they wanted to be, and maybe, just maybe that’s why they weren’t performing, or becoming passionate about anything. And just then, he remember an op-ed in the New York Times today, that wrote about Generation Q. To be perfectly honest, I’ve lost count of what generation is what beyond my own, but this guy who wrote the article hit it dead on. Here are few important snippets that I enjoyed from the article:

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them.

There is a good chance that members of Generation Q will spend their entire adult lives digging out from the deficits that we — the “Greediest Generation,� epitomized by George W. Bush — are leaving them.

…Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit — so we all won’t be working for China in 20 years?

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual.

Maybe that’s why what impressed me most on my brief college swing was actually a statue — the life-size statue of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. Meredith was the first African-American to be admitted to Ole Miss in 1962. The Meredith bronze is posed as if he is striding toward a tall limestone archway, re-enacting his fateful step onto the then-segregated campus — defying a violent, angry mob and protected by the National Guard.

Above the archway, carved into the stone, is the word “Courage.� That is what real activism looks like. There is no substitute.

If you want, you can check out the entire op-ed here.