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7 american evolution, democratic engagement, and civic education In the summer of 2001, photographer Robin Bowman began a five-year project traveling around the United States taking pictures of and talking with young adults. The result of this endeavor was the 2007 award-winning book It’s Complicated: The American Teenager. Part of what made her book so successful was Bowman’s approach to her subject: “I was not there to judge these kids or to rescue them. My intent wasn’t even to definitively answer any question, only to ask them and record their responses. . . . What we see and hear in this book merely records a moment in time when our paths crossed.” The teenagers’ answers to her questions illuminate the pictures as much as the photographer’s eye. These questions cover a wide range of subjects: “Where do you get most of your information?” “Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?” “What is one of the biggest problems in the world that you would like to fix?” “Where were you on September 11, 2001?”1 The answers, as well as the pictures, are as diverse as the country in which these young Americans live. Bowman’s photographs and interviews of 419 teenagers from Maine to California create a picture of American youth that is humbling for anyone writing about young people writ large. The differences between these young people are palpable. There is the eighteen-year-old Navy seaman from Easton, Georgia, who would like to go to the Middle East “and shoot at ­ people,” and the sixteen-year-old high school girl from Ithaca, New York, who “would just love to have peace in the world.” There is the eighteen-yearold from Darien, Connecticut, who feels that her peers discriminated against her after she became Miss Teen America, and there is the seventeen-year-old little ­ person from Nashville, Tennessee, who has never been on a date. There is the seventeen-year-old Church of God preacher in Varney, West Virginia, and the nineteen-year-old voodoo priest in Houma, New Orleans. There is the nineteen-year-old African American father of four in Selma, Alabama, and the nineteen-year-old Caucasian mother of two in Jones, ­ Alabama, Childers_07.indd 176 22/06/12 5:49 PM ­ neither of whom graduated from high school. The youth Bowman ­ presents in her book are the youth of a diverse multicultural democracy. They are­ Christians, ­ Muslims, and Jews. They are heterosexual and ­ homosexual. They are ­ children of privilege and kids literally living on the street. They are athletes and ­ artists, cheerleaders and criminals, gangbangers and good ol’ boys. They are, in short, young America. Bowman is aware of this when she acknowledges, “It is undeniable that our children affect and reflect who we are as individuals and as a nation. Perhaps by coming to know our kids, adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, we can become acquainted, or­ reacquainted, with ourselves.”2 Implicit in this statement is the assumption that we need to be reacquainted with one another and ourselves. This is an assumption I share. While Bowman’s goal was to paint a picture of American teenagers in individual detail at particular moments in time, my goal in this book has been to paint with a wider brush and broader strokes. Furthermore, my aim was to only portray one part, although an important one, of the lives of some American youth—the civic and political aspect. So instead of individual­ portraits, I have presented a panoramic painting. It has been, moreover, a moving panorama. This book has been guided by one basic thesis: as the social and cultural norms of the United States have shifted, the ways in which the American people imagine their democracy have also changed. Like Bowman, my point has been to avoid criticizing the more recent generations of young adults in this study for the way they learned to democratically engage the world around them. Having grown up in a different world, can today’s young ­ people be blamed for being different than the youth of an earlier time? Would any good come of disparagingly calling today’s youth some name akin to “slackers” or “Generation Xers”? My goal has been, instead, to describe the changing ways in which young people deliberate about politics and community over time. The question is not if the youth of today view politics differently than youth in the past, but how their views are different. Change is both natural and...

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