Youth Subdued

[Donnachaidh]

http://counterpunch.org/levine07282011.html

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. Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

Much more at the link --

[ananda]

1. This is a very insightful and sobering analysis.

I would agree that it is the lack of activism that has resulted in
the government's ability to just run roughshod over all our
cherished institutions and entitlements.

Our society is so brutally oppressive that not even the poor, the
hungry, the dispossessed are active on their own behalf. This is
really too bad.

Furthermore, there is virtually no one in the media speaking out
for these people and showing us their plight in a way that would
ignite activism: no John Steinbeck, no Edward R. Murrow, and so
on.

[SoCalDem]

2. 35 years of media-bad-mouthing Social Security has "worked"

:(

[spooky3]

3. They're also worried about getting a job in the first place. Retirement seems so far off.

[marions ghost]

4. It's also a much more complex world

young people are hunkered down in their little microcosm trying to stay out of the pitched battles that they realize are going on in the political sphere. Things are so nasty and so complicated can you blame them for their "filter" being Jon Stewart? I can't. I can hardly face it myself but I force myself to because I know it's dangerous to think you can hide out from what is happening now. There is no safe place to hide. But the young are doing that now for survival.

How can you ask people who can't even imagine being old to have an opinion on Social Security? They are just coping with how to make ends meet right now in the present. And it is not easy at all. My niece who's been working full time as a high school teacher for two years just got laid off in Florida. She has crippling school debt after getting a master's. How do you tell these people they should be out working for a better world right now?