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It may come as a shock to those that
do not remember the Vietnam War - but the youth of this nation brought
LBJ's government and Nixon's, to its knees! They virtually imprisoned
Nixon in his White House with public demonstrations Against-the-Vietnam
War. That's one of the reasons that so many streets around the capitol
have now been closed off-so that like the free-speech zones-no
demonstrators can get close enough to re-enact those powerful moments from
history, once again.
Many of the leaders of that day
and time have either died, sold out, or joined the opposition-so it's
understandable that so few know much of anything at all about those times
when the youth of America pointed the way and led the charge to
END-that-WAR, which was the precursor of this generation's version of that
same war that is now dying in the Middle-East. That was one time when the
young taught the rest of us a major lesson in how to stop an unjust and
meaningless war!
In today's world the young, as a
group, no longer give a damn about anything beyond their own future place
in a corrupt and mindlessly murderous world. But maybe we're to blame as
well because too many of us were far to busy to bother keeping track of
what is NOT going on in the school systems that we all have paid for many
times over.
I touched on this in "Would-be
American Leaders" thinking that
the message would be clear-but in response to a reader-I discovered I was
wrong!
Here's what I said in part to
that reader.
"What I was talking about
had more to do with the majority of "students" in America; "the
world" is a much different story. The logos of universities are all over
television and the sports pages, and while there must be some high-profile
students that are unbelievably brilliant - what I was talking about was
the underdevelopment of the human side of "America's students." Students,
for all the testosterone of that "age" do not live in a vacuum: because
none of us can.
When the nation's presidential
elections were stolen - where were the "student demonstrations," the
campus closings and the public demands for redress? If we had law
professors in the law schools, where were their students on that day or
during the six years since - along with a second stolen election? In
Miami, at the FTAA convention when police-thugs beat the crowds and the
elderly for three straight days of police driven riots - where were their
youthful defenders? At the conventions for both political parties, when
the police-state cops were rounding up and locking down the protesters
from "free-speech zones" - where were those college students as
an identifiable group? (*)
They simply were not there - in
any kind of numbers.
When the government cut the
number of medical schools to insure that the profits in medicine remained
protected - where was the student rebellion in the med schools, or on the
campuses anywhere in the USA? When nursing was slashed, and foreign
workers were imported to take over at much lower wages in hospitals across
the land - where was the public protest demonstration from those in
nursing schools? In the arts that have been co-opted and virtually
destroyed by federal programs for the arts (by various names) - where were
the protests by real artists, writers and musicians? When college
"chairs" were created by the very companies that drove this
takeover of the USA, where was the moral outrage from those who were
enrolled in those schools? Moreover why are demonstrations largely
composed of those too old to matter to the system, too far-out to resonate
- or just those people too angry to remain civil? In my view today's youth
have already been compromised by the system - as they are the new elite in
waiting - and they are too often virtually incomplete human beings.
Too often college consists of
only observations, de-constructions of reality and meaning, and generous
serving of training in how to worship everything that is wrong with this
society. In exchange for all that money, students don't get an education,
they get a piece of paper that says GREED is GREAT, and "only
sucker's care about anyone else."
In the world people die by the
millions and there are millions more who only live at the mercy of a
pen-stroke by the corrupted and the vane. Humanity as an entity with
achievements and dreams are looked at, but more as Petri dishes of
curiosity, than as flesh and blood people with flaws and talents alike.
What happened to "the schools of
journalism" or investigative reporting - the same thing that happened to
everything else - the concept itself was sold out and there was NO protest
from those most directly affected (the public and the students).
Incidentally, the people that are
now demonstrating and taking to the streets to protest, are doing so in
part, so that the young might have some of what they had a right to
expect, when they were that age. And where were those that so many say
they cared so much about (the NEXT generation?) - They were learning how
to run those same corporations that have stripped the country of promise
and prosperity in the name of personal wealth and greed - of course!
It might have been different if
most students had had to work to go to college, because then the students
would have appreciated what they had, and they would have known when their
money was going to support their own destruction and not toward "a
higher education."
That in a nutshell is my
complaint about "students" in what the Decider calls "The
Future" as he and his see it, in this Twenty-first Century of
theirs!"
But here's the real tragedy: In
Washington and across this land a huge percentage of people are confounded
by how to deal with Bush & the Bandits. Impeachment is handicapped by
the fact that the public has not demanded the arrest of Dick Cheney and
the subsequent prosecution of Bush by Impeachment proceedings. The missing
component in all of this is that huge number of young people - the same
group that brought down the government over the illegal and obscene war in
Vietnam. Those students were idealistic to be sure, but they knew their
lives were on the line - hence they fought the government to a standstill
until the war was forced to an end.
Today's youth are flirting with
disaster because they will not stand up and be counted as being anything
at all-instead of taking part in what could have been a major tuning point
in all their lives, not-to-mention what that action could have done for
the planet and for the restoration of the United States as a survivable
idea. During Vietnam this silence of the students now would have been seen
as the TREASON that it would have been, then.
How far we have fallen as a
people and a country in just the last thirty-plus years-yet this failure
continues to go unnoticed! There will be no Cavalry that will ride to our
rescue now or tomorrow - we must save ourselves from these Traitors or die
in that attempt-because there is no way to live with tyranny, except with
free speech that cannot be silenced!
Jim Kirwan
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