Contemplating Russian from Bloomington, Indiana (A Summer in the Midwest)

In nine weeks, a decent amount can happen. I figured nine weeks in the summer was not too long to be learning Russian, but a lot can still happen; after all, we cram an entire year’s worth of Russian language into those two-and-a-little months.

The language program at Indiana University ends with an Oral Proficiency Interview Computer (OPIc) exam. It was part of the program, to test our progress and see how much we learned. It was also for the program to show off how great they are for taking a bunch of rag-tags who don’t know a lick of Russian and making them somewhat fluent in two months. And then we all failed. In fact, our tests weren’t even processed for a grade because of how poorly we all did, based on our overwhelming sense of failure as we were taking the exam. We had taken the wrong test. I don’t know why we were told to take Level 2 exam, they just told us to and we followed. So there we were, sitting at these computers with clunky headphones, staring at a computer avatar named Irina, watching the past nine weeks of our lives flash before our eyes. When we gathered outside, one classmate neatly summarized the experience: What the fuck was that?

It wasn’t that bad actually, but we’d already had a run of bad luck. For example, over the last two weeks, the dormitory’s fire alarm went off twice in the day and twice in the middle of the night. Language students were roomed on the same floors to practice in an “immersive environment.” Turkish lived on the third floor, Chinese on the eighth and ninth floor, Russian on the tenth and eleventh—I think Arabic lived on the sixth, but I’m still not sure. The concept is that you could speak in the language or aggressively “charades” at each other. None of us followed it. But fire alarms are understandable. There was the second-year Russian student on the 10th floor who cooks breakfast at 5:00 am and occasionally burns it, and there were the Turkish students who burnt hamburgers. So when it came to the OPIc, it was just another mistake. A lot of accidents occurred that summer, and the OPIc and fire alarms were the more explicable ones.

Now, the Indiana University Summer Language Workshop, also known as SWEESEL, is held every summer on the main campus of Bloomington, Indiana—Midwest, USA. For 68 years, the Workshop has taught languages to about 200 students each year.[1]

Consider this: What is called the Midwest is secured from the interior plane between the Applachian Mountains to the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West. The North is landlocked by Canada and to the South is, well, the South. (There is some debate on whether Kentucky can be considered Midwest, but according to US Census Bureau, Kentucky is a southern state.)[2] The region’s main cultural divide is between the Great Planes and Great Lakes. The Midwest is predominantly Christian, Protestants and Catholics as the largest groups with scatterings of Lutherans and South Baptists. It’s also home to several swing states and deep pride in sports. The spoken dialect of the Midwest is considered Standard American, also known as General American[3], although there are exceptions to Minnesota’s Canadian influence and Missouri’s Southern touch.

Russian was the first language offered when the Indiana University Summer Language Workshop was founded in 1950, during the height of the Cold War.[4] Today, the Workshop represents a more multipolar political reality, some summers hosting up to 36 languages—including critical languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but also Haitian Creole, Mongolian, and Persian Pashto. But the origin of the Workshop, which continues to be dubbed SWSEEL (Summer Workshop for Slavic and East European Languages), is a reminder of its roots in a bipolar political reality that gripped even the insulated, land-locked Midwestern, USA.

Today, the Workshop is hosted on IU’s main campus in the city of Bloomington, located in Monroe County. Bloomington is Indiana’s seventh-largest city, although the student population of approximately 40,000 makes up nearly half.[5] Like many college-towns, the city leans politically left.[6] Bloomington has “college-town” vibes, with Welcome Students! signs along stores and groceries, be-speckled with the university’s red and white colors. It’s also home to a number of small wonders, including: Book Corner on the corner of Walnut, Village Deli where I ate with the Parkinsons, Nick’s English Pub which Obama visited in 2008, musical performances in Bear’s Ale House & Eatery, Sample Gates in the evening as downtown lights come on against still-bright haze of the late sunset sky.

Also in Bloomington is Siam, Taste of India, Mexican Eats, Little Tibet Restaurant, My Thai Café Plus Sushi, Lucky Express, and other “exotic” international cuisine options made comfortably local. Soma is something of a local coffee chain with choices such as Razz-Ma-Tazz (dark chocolate and raspberry) and the Lewinsky (white chocolate, coconut, and caramel). Their downtown location also has a fascinating bathroom with public transport maps plastered to the wall, with commentary on different locations and bike routes—something NUMTOTs[7] might describe as “peak transit”—as well as bejeweled, decorated “throne” next to a paper cutout of the King of Pop—Elvis Presley. Bathroom graffiti stating “You are Enough” and “Blow Up the Sun” is somewhat charming with Christmas lights. Elsewhere downtown is a bar called Kilroy, referencing the American graffiti icon of WWII lore.

For nine weeks I got to see quite a bit of the city of Bloomington, Indiana, and, feeling quite alone in the vast spread of the Midwest, sat with and enjoyed its company.

With regards to the fire alarms and the OPIc exam, it was just human error. In the case of physical injuries that occurred over the nine weeks, it was probably coincidence. One classmate was playing soccer when she injured her shin and was stuck with a cast. Our other classmate, we had already come to expect seizures on a frequent basis. Early on she informed us of her health complication, so that was no surprise. A group of students kept an eye out to catch her when she passed out and there was nothing anyone could really do—it happened a few times every day, we hoped for the best, turned her on her side and, as the British WWII saying goes: keep calm and carry on.

And then there was our classmate who became paralyzed.

The exact syndrome had a name that I’ve already forgotten, but the doctors described it as his body attacking his own nervous system. It’s just one of those things that happen. Still, he seemed to be in a fairly good mood from the Snapchat stories I’ve seen. We continued on.

To be fair to our class, persistence was of no short supply—a necessary quality in language learning. Learning a new language is no easy feat. For those of us raised with only a single language, learning another can feel like mental gymnastics. Past the age of 10, scientists suggest the chances of reaching total fluency drop sharply. In a 2014 study led by Amy Finn, then a post-doctorate fellow at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, it was claimed that adults’ developed cognitive skills, in fact, hinder the learning process.[8] “When trying to learn morphology, at least in this artificial language we created, it’s actually worse when you try,” Finn stated.[9] Previously it had been theorized by linguist Elissa Newport that the more developed pre-frontal cortex—yes, the very thing that parents hang over teenagers for not being ready to make good decisions—could actually interfere with learning.

Our program at Level 1 Russian was intended to provide a week’s work of instruction each day. Compared to German, which ranks as a level II language, the Defense Language Institute considers Russian as a level III language—alongside Turkish, Thai, Farsi, and Hindi—requiring 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency.[10] The United States Intelligence Community also regards Russian as a “critical language.”[11] Yet, Russian continues to be on the obscure side in American colleges, falling behind Spanish, Chinese, French, and growingly popular American Sign Language. In the fall of 2016, only 20,353 students from 2,547 US institutions of higher education reported enrolling in Russian, in comparison to Spanish at 712,240, French at 175,667, American Sign Language at 107,060, German at 80,594.[12] Even Chinese, a level IV language with a longer learning period, came in at 53,069.[13] As US college enrollment in language courses drop, Russian experiences -23.6% fall in US college enrollment from 2019-2016, more than twice of Chinese (-11.4%).[14]

A little while back, my grandparents called to share their wisdom that I ought to learn a foreign language. When I informed them I was studying Russian in the Midwest this summer, there was a pause over the screen. It was not what they had been hoping to hear (Chinese).

“Who speaks Russian?”

“I guess Russians,” my dad joked. (Yes, he has reached “dad-joke” level.)

But for a practical answer, Russian is considered the official language of four countries—Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan—and an unofficial language of Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.[15] Approximately 265 million people speak the language, placing it as the seventh most spoken language in the world.[16] It is also one of the six official languages of the UN. It is the most widely spoken native language in Europe and the third most on the Internet, at 6.2% of all websites – after English and German.[17] RuNet, short for Russian Internet, has its own preference of search engines (Yandex, rather Google) and social media venues.

Linguistically speaking, Russian is an Eastern Slavic language of Indo-European, characterized by palletization, and mix of hard and soft sounds. Like many other Slavic languages, Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet with both Greek and Old Church Slavonic letters. Their perfective aspect uses future and past, but—unlike Latin—lacks a present perfect. The cases—nominative, genitive, dative, accusative—have the same function in Latin, and the prepositional case can find a similar counterpart in the Latin ablative. For a century or two, Russian nobility also copied off of French and German vocabulary and there are also several words borrowed from surrounding East Europe influences, although the language has been revised with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Repeated attempts to unify the language into a singular form led to minor blips for some words caught between old and new, with minor dialect and pronunciation differences.

TL;DR: Russian is basically a linguistic borscht—still very much a type of soup with many things thrown in. Like many recipes, there are some disagreements of how it ought to be made or pronounced, but they are generally agreeable to the main idea of what borscht is.

An aspect of linguistics that I find fascinating is how words relate to their root meaning. There is a constant decomposition and regrowth between usage and understanding. Sometimes these changes survive, sometimes they only last a short period before relapsing into new definition. Now, in actuality, one cannot put too much weight on linguistic determinism as it promotes a sense of boundaries and bullheaded-ness. But relativism can be an interesting window to the way we conceptualized ideas in daily use. For example, in English, the word “security” derives itself from the Latinate se cura – “without care.” However, today, “security” is more associated with a sense of firmness and stronghold, rather than a hakuna matata “no worries for the rest of your days,” that its origin might suggest. On the other hand, the Russian word for “security” comes from “безопасность.” The prefix без, similar to se, is a preposition for without. But while the Latinate se cura is “without cares,” Russian безопасность is “without danger.” The root of cura, curae is used to describe a sense of attention, care, and healing; to be without cura is to suggest that it is no longer necessary—everything is already cared for. With Russian безопасность, danger (опасность) is the root. To be without danger, unlike cura, is not to suggest that danger was ever necessary, but rather ever-present. In fact, some of the best of Russian literature hovers with a similar, ever-present fatalism—weather, government, and death.

In his Ecce Homo, Nietzsche describes it as:

“Against all this [the pain of existing] the sick person has only one great remedy: I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow.”[18]

Perhaps in our summer Russian class, though less darkly, was a similar acceptance of something outside our reach? What else were we to make of our unfortunate series of accidents and injuries?

Our classmate wasn’t even supposed to be driving home when he crashed into a cornfield.

The Workshop wasn’t over for another four weeks. Russian Level 1 and 2, alongside Arabic and Chinese, ran on a nine-week program in comparison to the others that lasted eight weeks. But this classmate had to leave the program early when he developed a hernia. As soon as I heard the news, I thought Боже мой, he will end up in the hospital…and that’s what he did. It turned out he had kidney failure. The night before 4^th of July, classmates and friends stayed up until morning, ferrying headphones, a laptop charger, and canned peaches to the hospital.

The next day, the sun rose the same way as ever in Bloomington, Indiana on the 4^th of July. Now, you might recognize Bloomington as the subject of David Foster Wallace’s 2001 essay, “9/11: The View from the Midwest.” Wallace paints a picture of Bloomington post-9/11 with reserved, yet jingoistic patriotism, so quick to bind itself to the war cause despite a stark disconnect from metropolitan NYC. Wallace notes the tie-together of military-civilian life in towns like Bloomington as college students headed to war: “A fair number are veterans or have kids in the military or – especially – the various Reserves, because for many of these families that’s simply what you do to pay for college.”[19] As it turns out, we had a large number of ROTC students in our class (my roommate was one of them). Most of them, if not all, were there on account of Project Go—a military scholarship to study a language over the summer.

Since you’ve made it this far, let’s acknowledge there is a large political spectrum in the US that runs the gamut. Although more millennials are registered as independents than Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, or Silents, Pew reports that the younger generation has a more liberal outlook on race, immigration, and foreign policy.[20] Although more millennials consider themselves religiously unaffiliated than previous generations, ironically, they are seemingly more empathetic: more open to government security nets, diplomatic relations for peace, and diversity in race.[21] And still, there is an overwhelming cynicism among millennials and the younger Gen Z.[22]

Despite the casual, cynical calm of younger generations, it seems to me, especially with the current presidential administration, there is a sentiment that chaos is teetering on the edge. After all, the Doomsday Clock, maintained since 1947, is now two minutes until midnight. The last time it was this close was in 1953 when USSR tested its hydrogen bomb. But this is also, as far as I can tell, a sentiment more strongly felt by those of the younger generation. The older generation shies away from comparisons to the Cold War—having lived through the surface tension of a water cup nearly spilling over. When I was at a launch party in New York for an academic journal, I spoke with an older man, who had been involved with the think-tank for a while, and he expressed the sentiment that peace talks in Korea put us farther from a potential World War III in a long time. But some in the younger crowd felt otherwise.

A feature that separates the younger generation—millennials and Gen Zers—is a technologically fluent upbringing, perhaps, forcing them to be more cautious of dangers that aren’t physically seen. Today, many movies try to capture the danger of the internet [i.e. Untraceable (2008), Blackhat (2015), Nerve (2016), Searching (2018)] often encouraging parents to discuss these topics with their children. However, many of these films are poorly received. Perhaps many who had grown up in the era of the developing internet were already aware of those dangers long before our parents.

In “Cyber Conflict and National Security,” Herb Lin discusses the differences of cyber conflict to physical conflict. Lin argues that a significant difference is the haziness of attribution—if the attacking machine, the individual behind the machine, the entity under whom the individual is working for, a country that entity may or may not be tied to, or the jurisdiction of the individual can be brought to justice. Moreover, with technology’s landscape, distance and national boundaries become irrelevant. While the Cuban Missile Crisis—considered by some, the peak of the Cold War—may have dealt with the location of missiles in Cuba and Turkey to the distance of the USA and USSR, geography becomes almost nothing in technology. Although the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs reports that the younger generation is less worried about terrorism, perhaps they are right to turn their focus elsewhere.[23] Cyber conflict is considered, by American intelligence agencies, the number one threat facing the US for years now, with weapons of mass destruction falling behind in second and terrorism at third.[24]

The important point here, though, is that the mentality to how the younger, technology-fluent, generation perceives danger is not only hazy, it’s omnipresent and just on the horizon—something you just live with, like knowing not to click on email baits and for-god-sake put some tape over your computer camera. This is not meant to be fear-mongering. Rather, I hope to consider the landscape that technology has shaped. For much of the younger generation, we remember only a few years of life before 9/11. We had been raised in a country almost always, to some degree, at war in the Middle East. For us, there is a normality to war that is distant, ongoing, and somewhere that we do not see it. The mentality of this may be easiest to understand in the everyday: we wake up, brush our teeth, read the newspaper, go to school or work, complain about the latest thing that our classmate or coworker did, make arguments in the supermarket that we most certainly are not qualified to make, realize we forgot to bring down our environmental bags for groceries, and go about our day—in other words, we ignore it.

Anyways, returning to the student with kidney failure: he left the Workshop four weeks early to go to his doctors back home and that’s how he ended up driving himself. Some students joked that maybe he intended to drive through the cornfield as a way of shortcutting back to Arkansas. I believe, as we tried to make light of the situation, there was a shared sense that there was something rather unfortunate about our class. He was later hit by a car when he finally arrived home—around the same days as our move-out.

“What is with this class?” the phonetics teacher said, when a student collapsed in class.

“Cursed,” offered one of the guys. We shrugged, spun around in our swivel chairs, and waived away her concern if she should call 911.

On the last day of tutoring, we ended up hanging out with Level 2 students eating snacks and watching Russian music videos. “Oh,” said a Level 2 student, “You’re from the hospital class.”

There wasn’t anything wrong with our class, we were just an unlucky group. For example, we had a few students and a TA catch strep throat. We had an unfortunate incident when a student’s brand-new bike was stolen. Another student crashed her bike and injured her foot. One of the older male students was reported for creeping on the women in his class, and had to switch to a section with only male students. The seeing-eye dog of a blind student was attacked by a skunk near the dorm. One student had fallen on her back and left a day early to get treatment through a needle in the spine. I believe there were also three relationship breakups, but I didn’t keep up with all the gossip throughout the nine weeks, so it’s just been a strange summer.

In any case, at SWEESEL, while living under the beautiful Bloomington summer, singing to Russian folk songs, and watching Slavic films, one might sense this sustained posturing of calm, so easily threatened by external forces—explicable or not. The series of unfortunate events was simply out of anyone’s control. But if you allow yourself to glance through the lens that the Workshop was founded upon, it takes on aspects of a group of people still very much preparing for the worst and rolling with the punches of things completely out of control. If that seems too dystopian, consider the demographics. In our Level 1 class of undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D. students—one third are ROTC and at least another third are looking toward a career in academia or government. Regardless of what those pursuing academia might claim about their aversion to political practice—the cadre of American academics remains among influential consultants of D.C. politicians. At face value, the majority number of ROTC and academics give a rudimentary impression of preparing for something. When my grandparents reiterated the importance of Chinese, there was the oft-said line of how important business with China is; with Russian, you were assumed to be pursuing a career in the political arena.

I am not trying to suggest we are still in the Cold War—but rather articulate a sense of what Mad-Eye Moody might call “Constant Vigilance!” or an understanding of security as a growing and constantly maintained fortress armed and ready. Does that still seem too belligerent? Why, considering the threats from the current presidential administration? Why, considering that U.S. military also is expanding mobilization?[25] Or what about this: It is possible that the demographics of half the class could be sending the other half to war in the next decade. I am part of the half that will likely work in government, journalism, or academia. My roommate has wanted to be in the army since she was three. She will graduate second lieutenant, likely in armed combat, and into a probable death if we face war in the next few years.

Considering my fascination as someone who chooses to study politics as my college major, I’m curious if the typical citizen still considers these discomforts. Given a growing divide between military and civilian life, what part of citizenry allows them to not only accept war as a constant but pass responsibility and discomfort of this to “others”—the military, politicians, the “Hill” of Washington D.C. that we distance from “everyday life.” But perhaps that would only disturb the American standard “way of life,” which allows us the buoyancy to reevaluate a level of everyday calm, swivel along in our chairs, and keep going. Perhaps it is an unspoken, mutual understanding of our refusal to acknowledge which keeps these dangers from overwhelming our lives—an artificially accepted sense of normalcy shielding us from the actual effects of discomfort.

Or perhaps this is a norm for us all and in fact, we become upset after long periods of peace. Perhaps there is some comfort in the idea that one is only strong if constantly tested. This idea certainly pervades on the academic level. How often have we been told that tests are not meant to be stressful, but rather a gauge of our progress? How often have we spent hours the night before studying, cramming, learning test strategies, and practicing? Every Friday at the Workshop, we had an exam. They did not seem to get any less stressful as the summer went on. “I’m afraid and I don’t even know what of,” said a classmate as we left the review session for the final exam. By the time we failed the OPIc, we were just waiting for something else unlucky to happen.

Perhaps there is an internalized sense of vigilance that is more at comfort with the idea of constant preparation for the worse. That, in fact, we are so estranged from ‘pax,’ and it is only through the security blanket of preparation we are able to rest our fears. After all, perhaps it is true that we all sleep better at night with the knowledge of mutually assured destruction.

Still, I admire the determination toward maintaining a calm normality. The general shrug of the shoulder and acceptance of shit happening is performative to an extent of actually being functional. It’s like when your politics professor was pregnant and never addressed it the entire semester, except to say that she will miss a single class–“for obvious reasons” and then, sure enough, returned the next day as if nothing happened. It’s both strange and also weirdly admirable. It’s when you know, deep down, that things are probably not normally like this, but you don’t want to get into it when someone asks: “How are you doing?” — “Same, normal as always.” So, when we have continued again and again to perform a sense of normalcy for, perhaps, the hope of a reflected state of interiority, the pursuit of that should be regarded as just that: withstanding faith in the American “fake it till you make it” mentality toward performing the status quo; that, in the words of American author, Katherine Dunn, “There are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle towards normalcy.” Surely, such conviction in normalcy underlies a covert acceptance of the Russian soldier lying down in the snow—not despite but rather for the pretense that everything is okay, even though it probably isn’t, and maintaining that sense of order under a perfect Midwestern calm.

[1] Summer Language Study at Russian and Eastern European Institute, Indiana University, http://www.indiana.edu/~reeiweb/undergraduate/summer.shtml (accessed July 30, 2018).

[2] Todd VanDerWerff, “I’m from South Dakota, and I promise you the Great Plains are part of the Midwest,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10861176/great-plains-midwest (January 28, 2016).

[3] Standard American (AKA Broadcast English) is the preferred dialect of American newscasters and reporters. However, sociolinguist Dennis Preston argues that, “General American doesn’t exist. He was demoted to private or sergeant a long, long time ago.” (www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-america-where-people-speak-without-accents)

[4] Summer Language Study at Russian and Eastern European Institute, Indiana University.

[5] “About Bloomington,” Bloomington Census Data, www.bloomington.in.gov (accessed July 30, 2018).

[6] Kara Tullman, “Podcast: A Blue Dot in a Sea of Reds, Bloomington’s Liberal Attitudes Compared to the Rest of the State,” WFHB, www.wfhb.org/news/a-blue-dot-in-a-sea-of-red-bloomingtons-liberal-attitudes-compared-to-the-state/ (June 4, 2015).

[7] NUMTOT – Acronym for New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens, an FB page for urban/public transport content that frequents the term “peak transit” for variety of content. There’s a running-joke kink for Thomas the Train, a disdain for brutalism; and occasional helpful post about urban planning and use of public transport—10/10 recommend.

[8] Susan Scutti, “How to Learn a New Language: Stop Trying So Hard,” MedicalDaily, www.medicaldaily.com/how-learn-new-language-stop-trying-so-hard-294352, (July 22, 2014).

[9] Anne Trafton, “Try, Try Again? Study Says No,” McGovern Institute for Brain Research, mcgovern.mit.edu/news/news/try-try-again-study-says-no/, (July 21, 2014).

[10] “DLI’s Language Guidelines,” Association of the United States Army, https://www.ausa.org/articles/dlis-language-guidelines (August 1, 2010).

[11] “Foreign Languages,” U.S. Government and Intelligence Community Career and Education Opportunities, www.intelligencecareers.gov/ODNI/ResourceCenter/Foreign_Language.pdf (July 2017).

[12] Dennis Looney and Natalia Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Summer 2016 and Fall 2016: Preliminary Report,” Modern Language Association, https://www.mla.org/content/download/83540/2197676/2016-Enrollments-Short-Report.pdf (February 2018).

[13] Ibid.

[14] Nikhil Sonnad, “Fewer and fewer US college students studying foreign languages,” Quartz, https://qz.com/1243751/ language-education-the-number-of-american-college-students-studying-foreign-languages-continues-to-fall/ (April 3, 2018).

[15] Steph Koyfman, “How Many People Speak Russian, And Where Is It Spoken?” Babbel, https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine /how-many-people-speak-russian-and-where-spoken/ (August 29, 2017).

[16] Ethnologue: Languages of the World, https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rus (accessed July 30, 2018).

[17] “Usage of content languages for websites,” Web Technology Surveys, https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all (accessed July 30, 2018).

[18] Tim Murphy, Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Religion, SUNY Press, New York: 2001.

[19] David Foster Wallace, “On 9/11 as Seen from the Midwest,” Rolling Stone, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-foster-wallace-on-9-11-as-seen-from-the-midwest-242422/ (Aug. 19, 2011 reprint of Oct 25, 2001 issue).

[20] “The Generation Gap in American Politics,” Pew Research Center, http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/01/the-generation-gap-in-american-politics/ (March 1, 2018)

[21] Ibid.

[22] Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “For ‘Millennials’ a Tide of Cynicism and a Partisan Gap,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/us/politics/for-millennial-voters-a-tide-of-cynicism-toward-politics.html?_r=0 (April 23, 2013); Allison Wright, “After the Optimism: How Cynicism is Shaping Generation Z,” Brand Quarterly, http://www.brandquarterly.com/optimism-cynicism-shaping-generation-z (January 3, 2018)

[23] Andrew Wagaman, “For millennials, 9/11 and its aftermath shaped their view of the world,” Morning Times www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-911-millenials-worldview-15-years-anniversary-20160911-story.html (September 22, 2016).

[24] Jim Garamone, “Cyber Tops List of Threats to US, Director of National Intelligence Says,” U.S. Department of Defense, www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1440838/cyber-tops-list-of-threats-to-us-director-of-national-intelligence-says/ (February 13, 2018).

[25] Dan Goure, “Is the U.S. Military Preparing for War?” The National Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-military-preparing-war-20666?page=0%2C1 (May 15, 2017).