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' http://www.rense.com/general75/towould.htm 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? (1)

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 suckers 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 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 the attempt because there is no way to live with tyranny, except with free speech that cannot be silenced.

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) http://portland.indymedia.org/en/action/ftaa-miami/

BACKGROUND

Moyers ­ Life on the Plantation ­ video

http://www.truthout.org:80/docs_2006/011807B.shtml