Compared to most other generations, ours is fairly politically active, although it is not as easily visible because of the amount of activism that can take place on the Internet. It is not fair to compare our generation to the baby boomers because the baby boomers were an anomaly.

The activism of the ’60s and ’70s was brought about because students were unified to a high degree by issues that affected a large population of students. This is simply not the present situation. A friend of mine says that they should throw Nelson Mandela back in jail so that we can start a mass movement to free him again.

There were essentially two issues in the ’60s and ’70s that brought everyone together: race and war. While both are still issues today, they are not to the same extent.

While racism certainly still exists today, it does not exist to the extent that it did then. The baby boomers were the first generation to be widely opposed to racism, and, therefore, had more friends of other races.

Racist legislation allowed massive political activism regarding specific wording in legislation, whereas activism about racial issues has to depend on more ambiguous targets with many times less clear consequences.

Protestors are much more motivated when it involves more visible and concrete issues with a clear goal. In the case of the baby boomers, it was the end of racist legislation. Now, it is not so clear because people can only protest the idea of racism.

Likewise, the Vietnam War was a big cause of activism for the same reasons. While we certainly have our own version of an unpopular, foreign, seemingly endless war in the form of the war in Iraq, the conditions are undeniably different in the fact that the Vietnam War had a draft.

Because of the draft, all young people of the time were affected in some way, whether they were personally drafted or watched a friend or family member be drafted. For this reason, the war in Iraq has a much less personal aspect to it than the Vietnam War did.

Today’s college students may not know anyone to go to Iraq, let alone die there. As a result, we may hear the news of the war but never truly feel it. The average soldier in Iraq seems less like a victim than did Vietnam War veterans. The soldiers currently in Iraq all signed up for the military in one way or another and veterans don’t come home against the war in mass. Vietnam soldiers may not have voluntarily signed up for the military and, many times, came home fiercely against the war. Once again, protesters were able to call for a very specific change in policy.

Because of the personal nature of the draft during the Vietnam War, more people were willing to actively campaign against the war. Today, people are less likely to change their daily routine to protest the war in Iraq since, in many cases, it is not directly affecting them.

While our parents’ generation had two major, personal, concrete and unifying issues bringing them together, ours has none. The major issues of our time- climate change and the war in Iraq- don’t have the potential to do so because climate change is not concrete enough, and as said before, the war in Iraq isn’t personal enough for everyone.

Lacking the kind of issues that they had in the ’60s and ’70s, it is no wonder that our generation has not taken to the streets in the same numbers that the baby boomers did. This is not a flaw in our generation — it was a flaw in the laws and society that existed for the baby boomer generation.

Alex Freitag is a State News columnist. Reach him at freitaga@msu.edu .