8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back_--_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance?page=entire

Alternet
By Bruce E. Levine

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.
July 31, 2011  |     

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.  

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.  

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1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

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2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.

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Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients). 

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[47of74]

1. Our country will be a failed state within a few years.

[madmax]

2. A few years...

I was hoping to see Arma-get-it-on this week.

[Leopolds Ghost]

3. Ritalin is the #1 cause. Most American twenty-somethings are emotionally stunted because of it

And incapable of expressing any form of societal noncompliance with peer pressures.

That and the utter moral and political bankruptcy of the American left wing,
as witnessed by the collapse of the anti-globalization movement after 9/11
which I witnessed first-hand. They cannot organize or argue their way out
of a paper bag. That places nebbishes like Kucinich and Sanders, who voted
for the bills they argued against, on the left end of the spectrum, which
grown-up student leftists from the '99 era have "mellowed out" and resorted
to embracing, leaving wacky conspiracy theorists, as the only alternative.

Leaving no one for the vast seething multitude of discontented populists and left-libertarians
to rally behind, as we can't even convince our twenty-something and thirty-something neighbors
to agree with us about what's wrong.

Their main concern is about their favorite TV shows being cancelled and if something isn't
on the internet they aren't interested in hearing about it. You can't organize a political
movement by "friending" people on social networking sites unless your only goal is to reach
out to people in exactly your social circle and income group.

In a few years they'll be bitching about how future protests are hurting the environment
by making it difficult for them to drive to work in their environmentally friendly hybrid
cars. (Some already are.)

In a mass display of apathy, entire downtowns are blocked off for mass yoga demonstrations
as witnessed in places like Times Square and Santa Monica.

Nobody ever goes online and trashes those people for potentially preventing an ambulance from
getting to the hospital on time in the process of their demonstrations in favor of apathy and
a general spirit of agnstocism towards all concrete principles.

People went red in the face saying such things about the anti-globalization and antiwar marches.

[Lorien]

4. That was a scary and sobering read. Nt

[southmost]

5. k&r

[dameocrat67]

6. This is a closet libertarian

He promotes john taylor gotto a homeschooling advocate, who wants to eliminate public education, and the work of antipsychiatrists like Thomas Szasz a libertarian who does not believe that poor people should be treated by any doctors if they can not afford to pay and would let them die. He also denies the existence of mental illness, so he does not believe they need help. It is fucking sad that alternet promotes them and it is the main reason I dont like alternet.

[pampango]

7. Hasn't activism always come in ebbs and flows. There have been decades without

much activism followed by decades with a lot of it. When you're in the middle of one of those periods, it probably seems like it will last forever.

While conservatism dominated in the 20's, liberalism did so in the 30's and 40's, the 50's were pretty conservative, the 60's and early 70's pretty liberal, conservatives came back again in the late 70's and 80's and again from the mid-90's to now except perhaps from 2006 to 2010.

[Demeter]

8. It Started with Kent State

and it lingers through the generations. Parents don't raise children just to see them shot dead...unless they are in the military mindset.