Today, I bring your attention to a lovely little article that spells out the methods the ruling elite have used to ensure the stability of their fascist regime by taking the salt out of the youth.
From Alternet: 8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
While I highly recommend you take the time to read the lengthy article (I know, I'm asking a lot with a whopping four pages), I have cut and pasted the bullets of the list here for you.
1. Student-Loan Debt.Understandably so, half the list deals directly with the education system in this country, from saddling students with unmanageable mountains of debt, to the prevailing theme in public education of instructing children in passive acquiescence of authority rather than the pursuit of wisdom. Other line items of the list will come as no surprise to many, such as Television and the increasing trend of American youths being prescribed heavy mood altering pharmaceutical drugs.
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously.
6. The Normalization of Surveillance.
7. Television.
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
However, the one item on this list that gives me an honest hope for shattering the trend in the near future is "The Normalization of Surveillance." As we step deeper into the 21st Century we are being forced as a nation to stare at the glaring hypocrisy of subjecting ourselves to deeper and more invasive forms of surveillance in public forums. From the knowledge that your vehicle is being recorded at nearly every major intersection by a bevvy of cameras, to the recently approved Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act, which has less to do with protecting children as it does with providing the government with a way to throw out the old "Innocent Until Proven Guilty" maxim and keep tabs on all your internet traffic regardless of what you're doing on your computer, Americans have quickly and depressingly come to terms with the fact that Big Brother really is watching you. And despite all this, the police are getting away in the courts with passing new laws and regulations preventing the public from filming them on the job because they "have not provided consent to being filmed." No matter how dumbed-down the education system gets, you can not deny our youths the simple logical revelation that that just does not make a whit of sense. People just aren't that stupid.
I hope.
Here is The Great White Stanhope's closing to his special Deadbeat Hero, giving his thoughts on liberty and freedom in our nation today. The clip is broken into two pieces, and I have linked both of them here for your convenience.
Enjoy the weekend. And if there are any kids out there reading this on their summer break, well first off, there's a content warning on this page and you've already said you were 18 or older, so I don't want your parents coming after me for filling your little malleable heads with all this subversive rhetoric. But beyond that, come September when you trudge back into that splintered desk in that dilapidated classroom, don't just sit there and let the establishment bash you into submission with all the techniques mentioned above. Wake up. Participate. Take your lives back.
And in closing, I leave you with this quote from Ernest Hemingway's The Gambler, The Nun, and The Radio
-'Why are not all the opiums of the people good? What do you want to do with the people?'
-'They should be rescued from ignorance.'
-'Don't talk nonsense. Education is an opium of the people. You ought to know that. You've had a little'
-'You do not believe in education?'
-'No. In knowledge, yes.'
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