On Monday night, the first citations under the Social Host Ordinance — passed unanimously by the city council in January — were issued to the residents of a house on 17th Avenue and Mill Street. Each resident was fined $700 for hosting an unruly social gathering, violating noise disturbance laws and allowing minors to consume alcohol. The purpose of the ordinance is to decrease these behaviors, to make the streets quieter and safer and to increase harmony between college students and the residents of Eugene. Alas, by criminalizing such youthful indiscretions, the Social Host Ordinance effectively criminalizes youth.
When I set out to write on this topic, I was prepared to chastise my fellow students for their apathy and inaction; Democracy is all about showing up and you get laws like this when you don’t show up. I was surprised, pleasantly so, when I found that we did show up in large numbers, made our voices heard, turning city hall meetings into somewhat unruly gatherings. And what happened? The ordinance passed 8-0. Either the spokespersons against the Social Host Ordinance were remarkably unpersuasive and unreasonable or we don’t matter. In the eyes of legislators, the young — as a demographic of voters and citizens — do not matter.
The ignored root of conflict in our society is, and always has been, not race or gender or religion or class, but age — old versus young. In an article called “The War Against Youth,” published in Esquire one year ago, Stephen Marche writes, “Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you’re a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.”
The reason this conflict is ignored is simple: Young becomes old; disenfranchised becomes enfranchised; that young and dumb hippie in the 1960s becomes old and wise in the 1980s. Because it is by nature transient, youth might be the last acceptably oppressed minority in modern America. Employers are allowed to rummage through potential employees’ Facebook profiles for indecent, incriminating material — a de facto ageist discrimination. Many employers also rely on unpaid, college-age interns to do work that would have come with a paycheck only 25 years ago. One recalls the slogan printed in The Baffler journal: “Interns Built the Pyramids.” And finally, billions of dollars in entitlement programs will suck dry this generation and generations yet born. With all this, it is no wonder that college students just want to get wasted and unruly while they still can.
A possible, no doubt unintended consequence of the Social Host Ordinance is that it could transform normal, rowdy house parties into stages for social protest. Like most things of this generation, it is vapid and self-absorbed, but it just might be the only revolution we have left. Now that we have entered the age of the Social Host Ordinance, we may indeed have to fight for our right to party.