Author: Brandon Goldsmith

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Opinion Viewpoint

Ready for Generation Z?

While there is some disagreement on the time period, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce defines Generation Z as those born after 2000. In four years, the first batch of these Y2K babies will be early-onset adults, members of the freshman collegiate class of 2018, voters, and, in some cases, job-seekers. They are us the day after tomorrow.

So who are they? What are the influences that have shaped their worldviews and personal perceptions?

GenZ-ers’ lives began with the “hanging chad” and the contested 2000 election, in which a month-long political battle over who would be the 43rd president was decided by a controversial Supreme Court ruling in George W. Bush’s favor. Their innocence was lost by their first birthday, as the United States and the world were rocked by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. With the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of Iraq, Generation Z has known nothing but terror and a war on terror.

Z-ers have also witnessed the violence of nature. An outbreak of the respiratory disease SARS decimated hundreds in Asia and started to spread across the globe. A mega-tsunami killed hundreds of thousands living near the Indian Ocean. A Japanese tsunami destroyed a nuclear power plant and radiated the Pacific Ocean. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and many cities along the Gulf Coast. Heck, even Pluto lost its status as a planet.

As Generation Z was entering second grade, the “Great Recession” shook the foundation of the global economy, weakening fiscal systems and wrecking individual savings. As a result, many Z-ers experienced poverty or watched friends and family members struggle financially.

Gen. Z witnessed history as the first African-American president won the 2008 election. The brief Democratic super-majority in the Congress and Senate fought the recession with a stimulus package and passed the Affordable Care Act — thereby igniting a fury of political partisanship which gave birth to the Tea Party.

Generation Z’s middle-school years saw the congressional repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military, as well as the Supreme Court ruling against the Defense of Marriage Act, which opened the door to same-sex marriages in many states. The tweet became mightier than the sword, as an “Arab Spring” of revolts and civil wars spread across the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was killed by American Special Forces.

Our hearts were broken by mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. The Boston Marathon was bombed, and the country stood strong with the Red Sox Nation as they won the 2013 World Series.

Gen. Z’s first wave are now freshmen in high school, living with constant, swirling political vitriol. President Obama’s second term has been plagued by Republican investigations into the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the alleged targeting of conservatives by the IRS, and the revelation that the NSA was mass-collecting American’s cell phone records. Unbridled political partisanship and uncompromising ideologies are the governmental models they are witnessing.

These natives of a digitalized world have primarily experienced these dramatic events through some form of technology. An analog existence seems like the dark ages. The concept of collecting music or movies in physical form seems medieval to them. The majority of Gen. Z-ers have never invited someone over to see their record, tape, or CD collections. Their lives have been immersed in social media.

Generation Z’s use of the open-source reference site Wikipedia, founded in 2001, contributed to the death of the printed version of the 244-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica. That same year, Steve Jobs handed the CD a death sentence with Apple’s personalized digital music player, the iPod. Professional and social networking started to bloom in 2003, with MySpace and LinkedIn. Facebook and the picture-sharing network Flickr entered the scene in 2004.

In 2005, YouTube began providing videos that could be instantly shared. In 2006, the first 140-character communications were transmitted on Twitter. The 2007 2G iPhone transformed the mobile phone market and was followed by the iPad tablet in 2010. Generation Z has not known a world without the internet. Their globalized networks, virtually unlimited connectivity, and ability to multi-task between devices, gives GenZ-ers a skill set unlike any generation before them.

Generation Z-ers follow us, but they will ultimately be leading us. In four short years, these digital natives will be invading our offices, ballot boxes, and universities. Are we ready for Generation Z? We’d better be — and for whatever letter of the alphabet or mutation in Outlook — comes next.

(Brandon Goldsmith, a frequent Flyer contributor, is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. This piece is adapted from a portion of his dissertaton)

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Opinion Viewpoint

Talking Guns

With the release of Dianne Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban, the heated deliberation over gun control continues. One of the primary obstacles in the firearms debate is not deciding which side is right but how we engage in the discussion. You cannot have a reasonable conversation when each side lacks even a basic level of respect for the other.

The gun-o-phobes screech at the sight of any weapon, passing judgment on those who own and use them. While demanding tolerance in controversial moral matters, many of these same individuals show no empathy toward gun owners. The inconstancy in their actions adversely affects the credibility of their critiques.

The pro-gun crowd’s credibility is similarly compromised by the conspiracy theorists in their midst. Any possible regulation becomes an all-out assault on the Constitution, which leads to a snowball effect where the government confiscates everyone’s guns. Anyone even proposing the idea of new gun regulation is labeled a socialist or communist.

We should not allow the conspiracy theorists and the gun-o-phobes to dictate the terms of our national dialogue. Luckily, most Americans do not occupy these extreme positions. So what might a respectful and rational discussion about the regulation of firearms look like? If we can imagine it, then maybe we can make it a reality.

First and foremost, we need to be aware of other people’s concerns, their points of view, and understand that the passions flowing through their beliefs are real. Those who wish to regulate guns are genuinely worried about the safety and security of their communities.

The desire to remove what they believe to be dangerous weapons from their streets is not a novel idea. On April 19, 1881, the city of Tombstone, Arizona, passed Ordinance No. 9, “To Provide against Carrying of Deadly Weapons.” On August 14, 1882, Dodge City, Kansas, enacted Ordinance No. 67, prohibiting anyone from carrying “concealed or otherwise about his or her person, any pistol, Bowie knife, slung shot, or other dangerous or deadly weapons, except County, City, or United States Officers.”

In reaction to the growing violence in their cities, residents resorted to regulating the tools used by those who endangered their communities.

On the other side, law-abiding gun owners feel like they are being treated like criminals. They have the individual right to keep and bear arms if the weapons they own were legally purchased.

Beyond the Second Amendment, personal property is protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Gun-control advocates have to understand: If bans are passed, then we are authorizing the government to confiscate people’s possessions and limiting the choices they can make. It can be difficult to empathize when you will not be personally affected by a law.

Where might a discussion start, when both sides of an issue have legitimate concerns that appear to oppose and contradict each other? It begins at home. When issues are expanded to the national level, they lose their nuance and become black and white. Solutions that are appropriate for downtown Memphis might not apply to rural communities where the nearest neighbor is a mile away.

Tombstone and Dodge City took on the subject of violence at the local level. Both towns provided check-in spots, and people’s possessions were returned when they left town. They allowed gun and knife owners to keep ownership of their property but regulated their use.

Their answer appears to fall in line with Justice Antonin Scalia’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which affirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. … We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.'”

Some, however, claim that all guns are dangerous. But to follow that line of argument is to deny the existence of degrees. I have fired an AR-15 that was legally modified with a slide stock. While I enjoy shooting, I personally believe a “semi-automatic” that can empty a 30-round clip in less than three seconds meets Scalia’s “dangerous and unusual” test.

Maybe locally controlled centers or certified gun ranges could be created, where those who own weapons deemed “dangerous and unusual” by their communities could check their guns in and out. The Wild West solution seems to satisfy the concerns of both community safety and individual rights.

The challenge is to change how we discuss the regulation of firearms. Instead of a national discussion, we should have community-based conversations. The debate over gun control is not going away, and neither are our neighbors.

Brandon Goldsmith is a Ph.D. candidate in political rhetoric at the University of Memphis.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Language as Crime Scene

It is July 27, 2008, and candidate Barack Obama is finishing up his world tour. Three days earlier, his Berlin speech drew more than 200,000 people. The presidential campaign heats up as John McCain releases another controversial Internet ad claiming Obama “doesn’t care about the troops unless the cameras are around.”

In Knoxville, around 200 people squeeze into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church for a Sunday morning production of a children’s musical. At approximately 10:18 a.m., Jim Adkisson walks in carrying a guitar case from which he pulls a 12-gauge shotgun. Two people are killed and seven are injured before he is wrestled to the ground.

Believing he would be killed, Adkisson leaves a suicide letter, beginning: “To Whom it may concern … There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country and these liberals are working together to attack every decent and honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. … I couldn’t get to the generals and high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers. … I’d like to encourage other like-minded people to do what I’ve done. … Do something good for your country before you go. Go Kill Liberals!”

Where might thoughts and ideas such as these originate? According to the affidavit, investigators found not only the letter but three conservative books: Sean Hannity’s Let Freedom Ring, Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor, and Michael Savage’s Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.

As a graduate student studying political rhetoric at the University of Memphis, I decided to treat Adkisson’s letter as a crime scene. Like a detective working from a hunch, I questioned the books as suspects — texts that possibly influenced Adkisson’s language and conclusions.

Using the political theorist Edwin Black as my guide, I dusted the scene for rhetorical fingerprints: words, phrases, and themes that were traceable from the letter back to the books. The rationale behind my approach was to provide the authors with a fair trial. In March, I presented my findings to the Southern States Communication Association, documenting how Adkisson’s reasoning and conclusions appear to be influenced by the books.

Here are some of the fingerprints I discovered: In his second chapter, Hannity devotes an entire section to “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy,” describing the left’s attempts to undermine America’s main institutions. Adkisson adopts Hannity’s major themes and mirrors Savage’s primary argument: “They want to replace our system with a socialist or communist form of government.”

The letter’s logic is shaped by their narratives. Hannity proclaims, “After we defeat our latest foreign enemy, we will still face threats to our freedom, largely from left-wing extremists in our own country.” Savage’s conclusion continues Hannity’s story: “The enemy is not only at the gates; the enemy is at our throats. … America is being compromised from without and within. You cannot let them get away with this.” Adkisson’s justified attack is a logical outcome of their narratives: “I realized I could engage the terrorist allies here in America.”

According to philosopher Kenneth Burke, individuals get a “sense of what properly goes with what” from ideological vocabularies. My analysis reveals these linguistic equations: Liberals = Marxists/Socialists/Communists = Traitors or Enemies of America.

America is framed as being in a war, where relations are viewed as conflicts between enemies instead of conversations among citizens. Adkisson’s conclusion articulates this worldview: “They are all a bunch of traitors.”

America’s form of democracy, which requires deliberative engagement, is disabled by narratives that transform fellow countrymen into traitors. In the end, of course, the letter and the books did not commit murder, nor did the words and phrases pull the trigger. Adkisson did.

Political surveys reveal people are turned off by destructive discourse. According to political scientist Robert Putnam, every year America’s political system loses more than a quarter of a million potential participants.

From the national debt to Memphis City Schools, the citizens of the United States have difficult issues to tackle. We need more people to join the process. After the Tucson shootings, we took a step back and examined what we were saying, but the discussion immediately degenerated into mutual recriminations rather than true conversation.

For democracy’s sake, we should ask ourselves as a nation: To what extent should a person be accountable for the words and images they use in public discourse? I am not talking about political correctness. I am talking about ethics and personal responsibility, the heart and soul of a country governed for and by “we the people.”

Brandon Goldsmith is a Ph.D. candidate, focusing on political rhetoric, in the department of communication at the University of Memphis.