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

[Fire Walk With Me]

Samwise ‏@SamwiseEyes

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/8_reasons_young_americans_dont_fight_back_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance/#.UhZ1YsMTgSA.twitter …

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.

snip

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “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.”

snip

(More at the link.)

[obxhead]

1. K&R

Marking to read the full article when on the pc.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. DU Rec

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

3. K&R n/t

[daleanime]

4. K&R....

[felix_numinous]

5. Strict authoritarian

style of parenting or leadership, especially if abusive (and I think this is bordering on child abuse IMHO) has such terrible results--kids either pass on the abuse or are damaged by it in countless ways.

I cannot imagine going to schools like these--I would not be the same person I am today if this was my childhood.

[Vic Vinegar]

6. The biggest issue is

that young people are drawn into mass movements that are almost entirely cultural based or based on petty issues instead of a firm, structured mass movement that aims for the most reasonable direction of action.

For instance, Occupys problem in many places is that most of it was focused on occupying an area or shouting names at businessmen where the only place Occupy actually accomplished anything was when they came together and did things like trying to help disaster victims but even that wasn't enough because of the lack of leadership.

People like Noam Chomsky who don't believe in any sort of strong platform have been destroying young minds. We need MLKs not anarchists.

[Fire Walk With Me]

7. Thanks for your opinion, and your oddly pro-political/partisan OP. Occupy is not partisan.

Are you here for the right reasons? Do not use this group to attempt to drum up support for principles against which Occupy is aligned.

[Earth_First]

11. Swing and a miss...

It's pretty apparent that you spent very little time in any sort of organizing/participation role with Occupy based on your response.

Your response is heavily steeped in the authoritarian tp's that were haeavily utilized in order to undermine the legitimacy of Occupy.

[gopiscrap]

8. yup, this is so fucked up and tragic.

[Countdown_3_2_1]

9. Bread and Circuses. Classic distraction.

games, computers, electronic furniture, must have big screen TVs.
anything to occupy the time and MINDs of young people.

I forget which number it was but it was titled, "Television" in the article. So true.
Kids I know have no clue about politics. Music at their finger tips, is much easier to listen to than to commentary.

[warrprayer]

10. Goodbye my friend

[jonjensen]

12. dreamers are fighting back right now!

Dreamers who are young hispanic undocumented youth are holding a hunger fast protest for passage of the immigration bill. They were visted by veep joe biden. I fear this may evolve into hunger strike. If you are near washington d.c. please go and support these kids They want to be americans like us so bad! They need help of all of us and they have the numbers in 2006 they put a million people in the streets of los angeles and 500,000 in the streets of dallas, chicago and new york and many hundreds of thousands in other cities all on the same day! They have been told not to mass in large numbers so they don't scare the republicans into opposing the immigration bill ;but they opposed it anyway! Demand president Obama grant them amnesty! The worst tragedy is happening in my home state of arizona with mothers being arrested for working to feed their families and their young children wondering the streets!