Hippies of Today

[EnderD_503]

Originally Posted by T4Texas

I think it is because the college kids of today are a different breed than the ones in the 60's/70's. They are not cohesive as a group about social/political issues. As for the rest of the country...my opinion has always been that as long as the unpleasant things don't affect middle America's daily life, then they are not going to care or do anything about it. Vietnam was a very nasty war that drug on for many years and really split our country in many ways. I see Afghanistan as being the same kind of war, one where we chase them from pillar to post and never make any headway with it, but absorb huge loss of life in the meantime. It's a war that will never be won and at some point we will pull out just as we did in Vietnam leaving the country not for the better and having lost thousands of lives that could have been better spent. We have our politicians to thank for it and some of the blame is our own because we elect these people and do not hold them to some kind of accountability.

Except that demonstrations against Iraq and Afghanistan have occurred. Repeatedly. Around the western world. When the invasion of Afghanistan by allied western forces began in 2001 I was 16 years old and partook in a massive demonstration in downtown Toronto consisting of activists and individual groups of many stripes, that (as any good protest does) shut down the entire downtown core. It was the first of many. Since then there have been tons of protests across Canada against the Canadian military's participation in the invasion of Afghanistan as well as against the west's support for the American invasion of Iraq. Young people and youth organizations have been hugely influential as prime movers in these demonstrations.

There have been tons of similar demonstrations across Europe, and I know for a fact that I've read of them happening in the US as well. They do happen, but does one really expect Fox news and other similar sources to report on them?

One thing that I've noticed, though, is not that there is a lack of demonstrations, but that the media (and particularly with US media sources, though it happens in Canada to some degree as well) does not cover them...so unless you happen to be in the vicinity, you likely won't know anything happened unless some kind of damages occurred at which point the media will lap it up and talk about how the "evil anarchists" went about destroying things all willynilly-like.

Unlike in the past, North American media tries to focus less and less on social dissent in the form of protests than it did in the past. Look at the way the media passed off the various youth riots in Britain over police brutality, racism, poverty and tuition hikes/anti-austerity, as simple "hooliganism." It's very much a part of the government maintaining people's lukewarm contentedness with "the way things are." We have this notion today in North America in particular, that we have no reason to rock the boat about anything, and that no one has any reason to speak out about anything. Kind of like the G20 summit riots in Toronto that resulted in the largest number of arrests in a single riot in our history...and yet at first Torontonians bought the media's garbage about how "disgraceful" it all was...a year later and, surprise surprise, people's perspectives have changed. But if we went back, they'd still say the same damned thing and wag their little fingers.

I also disagree that university students don't care. At my own university there are tons of youth groups, from young socialist groups, young marxist groups, young trotskyists and so on. The number of politically charged groups at the university is in the hundreds.

The whole notion that "oh young people these days blah blah blah, they don't do anything anymore" is...kinda bullshit and is something people have said about young people for time immemorial. I would look, instead, to the media who really doesn't report so much anymore on what exactly goes on on the streets as far as demonstrations that criticise the government/military too much. I've been a part of demonstrations that have included hundreds of people, yet you hear not a peep about it in the major newspapers the next day.