"I bet if I gave the same exercise to government professionals over the age of 35, it would be quite the reverse, with states making up the vast majority of the threats and trans-national, non-state phenomenon in the minority."
plus, wouldn't a lot of them all sound exactly the same?
Here's one young person's interpretation of this:
Growing up in the shadow of the Twin Towers and the absence of a hegemonic competitor like Soviets is a big part of it. And the Bush administration’s massive incompetence has demolished the faith of many young people in the ability of the government to handle emerging threats.
But on some level a fair degree of it also owes from your students's realization that the United States has only a limited power to impose order on a fundamentally chaotic world. My childhood life as well as that of many of my friends was in an ordered, hyper-secure environment. They don't call the female voting bloc "Security moms" for nothing. I think that it is very hard to reconcile that kind of artificial reality to real life as everyone else knows it, and its very telling that they worry less about states than chaotic and unpredictable things more akin to the forces of nature itself.
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