This morning, I called my ex-hippy mother in hopes of getting some great stories from her youth throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. You know—marching in protests, fighting The Man, maybe even tales of dropping acid to expand her mind to find answers. Well, I didn’t get anything spectacular, especially about the acid. Yeah, she did some protesting, she said she cared—she said everyone cared back then. What I expected.

What I didn’t expect, however, was something of an apology. After letting her rant about us college kids caring more about getting new Ugg boots than staging full-scale protests, her tone changed. “Maybe it was our fault,” she said. “We [the Counter Culture generation] brought you guys up like, ‘you’re the best’…now that’s all that you think. Our parents didn’t care, we just got a roof over our heads and that’s it, so we turned all focus on our kids.” She, a living testament to the flower-power generation of the 1960s and early ‘70s, brings up an interesting angle to the activism debate.

United States college students have recently been labeled the most narcissistic generation yet, not just by my mother, but from results of a study conducted by San Diego State psychology professor Jean M. Twenge. She asked 16,475 college students between the years 1982 and 2006 to give responses to statements like, “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person,” and “I can live my life any way I want to.” Scores rose steadily throughout the study, proving students were reaching new heights of self-worth.

Instead of looking outward and forward to change, we have been focusing all of our efforts inward. Despite living in a time when political and social issues are reaching critical mass, we gave up, and diverted out interests to focusing on our own lives: getting into the best schools, getting the best grades, the best clothes, the best…stuff. The funny thing is that we received praise the whole time from our parents—our ex-hippy, peace lovin’ parents.

We try, repeatedly, to explain why we don’t have the activist spirit of the past, why we’re so wrapped up in our own lives. Can we just admit our less-than-altruistic ways already? If we’re so “self-righteous” then that energy can easily be focused into bigger and better things than earning a 4.0 or getting that impressive internship.

Many of our parents were distanced from their parents, more so than families today. Our grandparents wanted nothing to do with the Counter Culture their children clung to so dearly. They also apparently didn’t try to direct them towards future successes. When my mom turned 18, her mother said she had two options: to get married or get a job. College wasn’t even brought up because that was only for the rich or the super intelligent.

I can’t say that every parent/child relationship was lacking in communication and interaction back then. But something happened on the way from protesting and being an activist in the ‘60s, to becoming housewives and businessmen. Now look at us, wondering the same things, and they, our parents, didn’t do anything to help.

Instead of disregarding our interests, they brought us up to think we could do anything, achieve our dreams, and actually be something aside from a bunch of hippy protesters who later ended up right smack in the middle of suburbia.

Here we are now—in college and wondering what we should be doing during our precious time in the Ivory Tower. But we just talk and debate, save it for another day, instead of doing the “anything” we were taught we could achieve. We worry that we appear too blasé and that protesting what is wrong in the world is the only way to prove otherwise.

Both our generation and our parents’ have been misguided. They think we’re narcissists, but they should look at themselves and address where they ended up. The most activism my mom is currently participating in is sending money to Darfur over the Internet, all the while wishing she was doing something more. She’s not wrong, she’s just like us. A far cry from her hippy heyday.

The situation could be rectified if they gave a little and we gave a little. Our generation should band together, tear our parents out of their mini-vans, and thrust them back to their activism roots. We can learn to channel our self-importance into working hard for the future we deserve, not one in which we sit around trying to figure out the right way to protest simply because that’s what our parents did.