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

AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine

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.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

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.

Full article at link: http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back_--_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance?page=entire

doesn't cover it. The rest of the article makes it much more universal in nature. I recommend that people click through and read the whole thing.

The student loan thing only affects a minority of today's youth. The other factors discussed include far more people.

We need to end this fake Drug War which is simply making elites wealthier --

and corrupting everything it touches -- from our police departments to our banks --

Banks laundering drug money -- what was the last case -- $500 BILLION laundered by

one of the banks -- Wachovia -- now Wells Fargo -- ???

Think that was the bank --

When one has watched the Media and everyone pounce
full force, who wants to put themselves out there.

It is more important to be part of the group.

everyone should be interested in the techniques of control.

same for the middle class and teevee.

All good but these really stood out for me:

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.

“Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.

-Lack of a draft or other means by which the youth might find themselves killed.

We're staring at being killed for speaking or starving our way through working. Protests and the ever-vaunted non-violent techniques don't work anymore, because they learned their lesson in the 60s and bought up the media.

We're done. Cooked. They even bought our party from us.

I'd like to speak for a moment as a young former activist. All of what they listed is true...but I want to show you the biggest reason we were pacified:

YOU TOLD US TO SHUT UP.

"Everybody Chill! I've got this!"

"The adults are in charge"

"You don't understand the subtleties of the problem"



...Any of that sound familiar?

Any of that sound like, I don't know, authoritarian crap?

You guys trusted the system. You trusted the voting, which was obviously rigged. You trusted the people playing the kabuki. You trusted a system that, as George Carlin pointed out, "Threw you overboard 30 years ago."

The fear of real change killed us, and it's going to kill my generation and the ones after it.

We will pay the ultimate price because of your hubris and your fear of throwing out a system that never should have been there in the first place.

We were there. We believed. We were ready to fight. You told us to go home...and now you want us to come back and save you?

No. If this is what you need to learn the magnitude of the problem, then let it come.