The Goy Crisis

So the other day I was discussing (perhaps ‘talking at’ would be a more accurate description) the Boy Crisis issue with my class of (rather sleepy, uncommunicative) undergraduate students in an Intro to Creative Writing class, and it was something of a depressing eye-opener. As is common, most (but certainly not all) of the males in the class seemed to be somewhat in the category of video-game loving slackers, happy to fail the quizzes (because they haven’t done the reading), content to show up and consider that a triumph. Instead of the Boy Crisis I’m thinking it should be called the Goy Crisis, targeting particularly privileged (or semi-privileged) WASP-type males who seem content to have a good time and lose out in this competitive global economic structure. It seems a waste, of course, and seems as if a segment of the population who should be learning and growing up are stuck in a perpetual adolescence.
Of course every age and generation has its people who succeed and those who fail. As a professor, you want them all to succeed. So I hope how bleak it seems is an illusion. Maybe they will all grow up at some point and learn something. Or maybe they’ll turn out like the salesmen in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glennross. Thank god for Adam Sandler or those Hangover flicks: That way they can laugh as they’re watching the flat-screen in their parents’ den, after returning home to live with them in the post-graduate years.