“I didn’t know there were hate crimes against Jewish people.”

In the summer of 2017, I took Introduction to Sociology. I was in my late forties and had just started taking courses on my lunch break at the university where I worked. I’d dropped out of college and moved to NYC to be an actress in the early 1990s and other than taking classes here and there, I never returned to school full time. I never became a full-time actress either and eventually my day job at a bookstore turned into a publishing career. Fast forward to moving from New York to Texas, I was thrilled to get a job at a university press doing marketing and publicity. I was even more delighted to find out that one of the perks of said job was taking a free class every semester.

Back to sociology… The professor was lecturing to the class about hate crime statistics and comparing violence against people in the LGBTQ+ community and Jewish people when a young woman behind me declared loudly. “Jewish people? I didn’t know there were hate crimes against Jewish people.”

I was shocked. What the hell are they teaching kids these days!?! I was even more shocked to turn and see real confusion and befuddlement in the young women’s eyes. My first instinct was to judge harshly, but I quickly remembered seeing Shindler’s List at 21 and having a similar reaction. I left the theater wailing and asking my sister “Do people know this happened?”

I am sure that at some point in my less-than-adequate education at a private school founded in (ahem) 1969 in rural South Carolina, someone had taught us about the Holocaust. I had seen Escape from Sobibor, the Mel Brooks classic To Be or Not to Be, and any number of other films about the genocide of six million Jews along with five million others who were murdered because of their race, political affiliations, sexual identities, and perceived disabilities. I was the child of a civil rights advocate. I had Jewish friends growing up. I had read and loved The Diary of Ann Frank in sixth grade, but still… Whatever awareness I had about Hitler and WWII growing up was put to the test while watching that movie. I was hearing the story for the first time with a fully developed frontal lobe, and the abstract was brought into technicolor, just like the little girl in the red coat.

So this student... This young woman in Intro to Sociology having her own red coat moment about generational violence was my first true intellectual encounter with the budding generation known as Gen Z. After having spent seven years in college with them, and having raised one who is now 19, it is safe to say that the Gen Z students of seven years ago are not the Gen Z students of today.

My son’s kindergarten class in 2007 was the first one to have iPads and boy did we rage about that. I have fretted about my son’s addiction reliance on his cell phone for years days on end. In retrospect, my child and the countless young people I have sat beside in class over the past fourteen semesters know way more about the world than I did at their age. I have watched this generation debate climate change, cry over sexual abuse, and struggle with gender roles. I have read their short stories about suicide, heard their poems about drug abuse, and pored over their research papers on immigration and animal rights. Gen X had dusty old encyclopedias that were outdated and only the rich kids could afford, yet these kids hold the knowledge of the world in their pockets on computers that are more sophisticated than the ones my parent’s generation used to get to the moon. They have seen wars and massacres in real-time. They have watched millions of YouTube hours learning about everything. They have connected with their peers across the globe in ways the older generation will never understand. Yes, the Boomers might have sold them all down the river as money-generating avatars, but there is so much more there. They will be the ones to clean up our mess or suffer from it, and for that, we owe them everything.

These young people are now fully my peers and my classmates. Friday was my last day at work. Technically, I am a college senior now, so I am taking some time off to go back to school full-time. Majoring in English with a minor in creative writing and studio art. I am grateful for the opportunities and challenges this creates in my psyche. Everyone should be so lucky. I’m also deep into the second draft of a novel and looking forward to being a creative instead of just helping them get a story on NPR when their latest book drops.

I am a 50-year-old undergrad (technically 52 in four days but who is counting), and I should be terrified. But the truth is, I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.

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