"And how are the children?"

It's a miracle that Gen Z expects a better America because they have never seen one.

Every presidential museum has a subtext. Richard Nixon’s presidential library, for example, so effortfully replicates certain details of the White House that you can’t come away without the impression that he really wanted you to know that he was a real president before the thing that he had nothing to do with. JFK’s has so many pretty words everywhere — under glass, on screens, on walls, in your ears — that you can mistake them for actual accomplishments.

About a decade ago, we took the boys to Bill Clinton’s presidential library, which reminds me of a compliment someone once made of his intellect. Most people can express a thought in an articulate sentence. Some who have more practice and brains can unpack an idea in a clean paragraph. Bill Clinton speaks eloquently and charmingly in essays, and his library is the same way. It good-naturedly takes you through everything his administration accomplished on nuclear non-proliferation, the economy, race relations, the environment, health care, and public safety. Like the man himself, the Clinton museum goes on and on about everything he did.

I was walking through the permanent exhibits alone, everyone going at their own pace, when I ran into my oldest son, then around 10 or so, by the display of mementos about his foreign policy record. There were photographs, speeches, commemorative awards, and a letter from Bono. There was even a Northern Ireland peace process chess set to commemorate the Good Friday Accords. There was that famous photograph of Clinton with his arms spread wide as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat shook hands over a peace treaty.

There were more treaties, too, and I wordlessly ticked them off in my head with an “Oh yeah, forgot about that one” attitude when I noticed that Henry was staring at the display. The highlight for him is usually clowning at the presidential podium while I take his picture, but this display had his full attention, so I asked him what he thought was so interesting.

“I didn’t know we could do that,” he said. He didn’t know we could make peace. By that time, we had been at war in Afghanistan for his entire life.

His generation has reached adulthood believing that the United States is in decline. They don’t trust a government unable to protect them from clear and present dangers such as school shootings. They’re twice as likely as older Americans to experience depression and hopelessness. One out of every five Zoomers knows someone who has died by suicide. Almost as many think they would be better off dead.

Considering how this generation has experienced life in America, I wonder if that number won’t increase. My oldest son was born a few days before George W. Bush was inaugurated and was learning to crawl on 9/11. He was still in diapers when we invaded Iraq. We wouldn’t leave until he was in middle school, by which time Sandy Hook had taught him the essential truth about school shootings in America, that the threat was real and required frequent lockdowns, he should be prepared in case it happened at his school, and the government would do exactly zero about guns.

My oldest son was still in diapers when we invaded Iraq. We wouldn’t leave until he was in middle school.

His generation has lived their entire lives on social media platforms engineered to make them feel bad about themselves and to be outraged at others while politicians act like they are as powerless to do anything other than fighting amongst themselves. They were in high school when the grownups elected Donald Trump president — a thing that still sounds hacky and made up like a bad first draft — and in college when the grownups started fighting about whether face masks and vaccines worked against an airborne virus that killed a million people. My oldest son voted for the first time wearing a mask; my youngest son graduated from high school wearing one.

Back in that presidential library around 2010, I thought the bad times were over, that we were pulling out of Iraq and would soon be leaving Afghanistan. Remember how my oldest was learning to crawl on 9/11? He could legally drink when we finally left Afghanistan, and I haven’t even mentioned the concussive waves of Hands Up Don’t Shoot, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too. Their lives have seen the dizzying expansion of LGBTQ+ acceptance and the crippling backlash. And can we talk about what it does to an entire generation to reach the age of sexual consent only to have Roe v Wade overturned? Oh, also, nazis. Nazis are now a thing. Here. Nazis in America.

The truth is that my oldest son and I were visiting two different museums. I thought I was walking through something ordinary full of evidence of the status quo. He was looking at artifacts from another era. Now, looking back on the absolute mess adults have made of his country while he was growing up, I think he was right. All this — I say as I look out the window at the democracy up on cinder blocks in the front yard — is normal. Tech support isn’t going to send anyone over to suggest rebooting America so it starts working normally again. What Gen Z has lived through seems like an aberration to me, but it’s all they know.

The question isn’t why my sons’ generation has so little faith in government or such high rates of mental distress. The question is why, after living through arguably one of the worst and inarguably the dumbest eras in American history, they have any faith in government.

The miracle is that even though they feel ignored and unheard by their government, they still expect better. They expect better futures for themselves. Two-thirds of them expect to run their own businesses by the end of the decade. While the Boomers are freaking out about AI, almost three-quarters of Zoomers are optimistic about automation.

And here’s where Gen Z almost makes me want to cry, because they expect a better America without ever having seen one. They are more likely to see voting as a responsibility than a right, and their most motivating issues are exactly what has made such a mess of their country while they were growing up: reproductive rights, climate, racial justice, and guns. Just because all this mess is normal to them doesn’t mean they don’t know it can be cleaned up. They might not have any faith in American government, but they still believe in the American Experiment.

There is a tribe called the Maasi in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania that greets each other with the phrase “Casserian Engeri,” which means, “And how are the children?” They aren’t asking about that person’s children, but about the wellbeing of the youngest generation. The better the kids are doing, the better their future will be.

And how are the children? We’ve put them through hell, and the ones who survived school shootings, police violence, the plague, and every other thing we’ve thrown at them are struggling. But somehow they have it in their heads that they can make this place beautiful. They know there is a better America than the one we have shown them.

When the last Boomer has left elected office, they will be the ones running this country, changing it so it looks like the one that’s been in their hearts all along. Americans who grew up in the Great Depression became thrifty adults. Americans who were children during World War II became hella-patriotic adults. When Gen Z is running the world, it’s going to be a better world.

The kids are gonna be OK, which means we’re gonna be OK.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.

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