As the poor continue to become poorer, health care is seen as a privilege, social services are cut, millions can’t find jobs, no one can healthily live on minimum wage: WHAT ARE WE YOUTH DOING ABOUT IT? It is obvious that we have been conditioned to be obedient, complacent and passive. I see many people my age numbing out, focusing on pop culture issues over current events, unconscious of there consumer choice impacts and general apathy towards the government. How much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities? Psychologist Levine explains in his article 8 Reasons Young American’s don’t fight back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance including 1) student loan debt, 2)psychopatholigizing and medicating noncompliance, 3) schools that educate for compliance and not for democracy, 4) “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top, 5) shaman g young people who take education but not their schooling seriously, 6) normalization of surveillance 7) television and 8) fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism.
Excerpts I found extremely interesting:
1)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.
2)Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD (oppositional defiant disorder).
3) The nature of most classrooms (very unlike ours), regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation.
4) In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.
5) (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives.
7) Private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards.
8) A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to this it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements