“We are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generat

That’s Nicholas Handler writing. He is the winner of the New York Times Magazine College Essay Contest, and boy is it well-deserved. Although the essay is about the postmodern condition as observed by a precocious Yale boy, enthused over his newly found insight (“but when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blase college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one”), it ends on a high note:

College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.

Gil Scott-Heron once remarked, “the revolution won’t be televised.” That may be, but then again, maybe its seeds are being sown at this very moment, on a message board or a Facebook Wall near you.