Unlike an earlier generation of Americans, young people of today are MIA when it comes to fighting for our future
The younger generation of Americans is MIA when it comes to fighting for our future.
I have attended most of the protests in the past year in and around Sioux Falls. Over and over, I see the same people. Almost none of them are under 50.
I remember 1970, when I was hardly older than the four young people at Ohio’s Kent State University, killed by National Guardsmen while they demonstrated against the war in Vietnam.
When those killings occurred, I was two months away from going to Vietnam in the U.S. Army. That war was the issue being protested against, and nearly all of the demonstrators were of the younger generation, at least during the early stages of the protest movement.
Where are the young Americans of today?
My fear is that nearly all of them are engrossed in their handheld devices, reading only the highly slanted news their algorithms feed them. I fear that few of them are even aware of the most consequential revolution in history, one that has the potential of navigating us into a future of authoritarianism and oligarchy.
Going back to my younger years, at first I was not among the anti-war protestors of that era. My belief in the rightness of American action remained stalwart … until I saw first-hand what we were doing in Vietnam. I did join the protests upon my return from that debacle. We despised and hated Richard Nixon, who now seems like a harmless Boy Scout when compared with Donald J. Trump.
Consider the events of Trump’s first year in office:
The killing by an ICE agent of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis with the failure to even investigate the behavior of ICE,
the declaration that he is now the acting president of Venezuela,
the gutting of USAID (resulting in untold deaths around the world),
the pardoning of the thousands who desecrated our Capitol and fought and injured our police
Where are the young people? Some say the strength and powers of despotism rest solely upon the fears of resisting. To that I would add a question: How about the apathy of the electorate?
Apathy is what I am seeing now when I attend these protests, largely populated by the older generation, who still understand … who still get it.
I now fear social media as much as I fear Donald Trump.
Younger Americans: Get off your screens! Join the democracy! Where are you?
Van Carter of Sioux Falls is a retired broadcast journalist and environmentalist who published a green website for 15 years.
Photo: Anti-war protestors, 1971, public domain, wikimedia commons
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